Both myrialux and I dislike zucchini and eggplant (among other things, thanks supertasting), but have found that if offending ingredients are cooked long enough with other ingredients so that they all meld together, often the results are perfectly acceptable. And we both want to expand our culinary horizons.

I bought the cookbook Bohème Cooking: French Vegetarian Recipes by Carrie Solomon, and found this rustic ratatouille recipe, which we tried tonight. It was good! It all blended together so we couldn’t taste the individual offensive vegetables, becoming more than the sum of its parts.

Recipe under the cut.

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We have a lot of a nice homemade mayonnaise in the fridge because it was simpler to make it than to go back out to the store.* And there’s a lot, like close to 2 cups, because I couldn’t make less. I tried, and it failed to emulsify.

So! What do you cook that takes a lot of mayo besides potato and egg salad? We have favorite recipes for those already. I can’t use it for sweet things like mayonnaise cake** because it’s lightly flavored with garlic.

*Power was out for a good 12 hours or so at the house while we were gone, and there’s various things in the fridge that I didn’t trust, including the opened mayonnaise. The door would have been opened by the petsitter getting the open can of cat food out.

** If you’re not aware of mayo-based baking, the resulting things do not taste of mayo. It basically replaces the fat and some liquid in the batter.

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I have a perennial quest to find non-Japanese-bento recipes that I can treat like Japanese bento recipes: because the packed-lunch culture is so prominent in Japan, there are cookbooks with recipes specially developed to be stored in the freezer (affiliate link; about 1/3 of the recipes in that book are freezable) that you can just take out and either (a) pop into your lunch--which is stored at room temp--and will thaw nicely and be ready to eat at lunch time or (b) you nuke to thaw, then pack in your lunch when cooled. (You cool things that you nuke or were refrigerated and heated in the toaster oven to crisp up to reduce condensation in the lunch, which promotes spoilage.) Prepping your lunch in the morning takes maybe ten minutes, spread out in two five-minute sessions if you need to heat it up and cool it before it goes into your lunch.

Awesome. I want to do that with more non-Japanese recipes, so they mesh well with things we cook more often. I'm not particularly good at braining enough to look at a basic Japanese freezer bento recipe and see how it would work if I subbed in other seasonings and sauces, so I periodically poke around the web for recipes, especially vegetable side dishes, that freeze well.

Alas, this search is complicated by the existence of the Freezer Meal World. This is a movement that aims to simplify meal prep for moms (it's always moms) by setting aside one or two days a month, doing a big grocery run and making a bunch of dishes, mostly casseroles but there's some variation, and getting them to a point where they can be frozen. Prep on the day, however, requires that you remember 24 hours in advance that you have one of these things so you can put it into the fridge to thaw overnight, and then you have to remember an hour in advance of dinner that you did that so you can preheat the oven for 15-20 minutes, than bake the casserole for 45 minutes. Or, if it's a boil-in-the-bag type of meal (say, pasta with sauce), then you need to thaw it overnight and then gently boil it until it's heated.

This world never uses microwaves to thaw or reheat. Or maybe they do, but I've yet to run across a website with freezer meal recipes that includes microwave instructions or a separate section for nuking-friendly recipes.

In general, there's also not that many side dishes that get frozen--they're expecting you to boil some corn on the cob or use some frozen vegetables or make a salad on the day to go with the casserole you've reheated.

This is all somehow supposed to save you time. I disbelieve, when I could just make tacos on the day and use my weekend to do something else. I mean, I found these three side dishes today, which sound good, except that the "prep" beforehand saves you zero time over doing it day-of and in fact adds time because you need to thaw them overnight. They're good for preserving food you bought for later, they're good for extra stuff in the CSA box you need to do somethin with before it goes bad, but they are not, as the website explicitly says, good for saving you time: Sauteed Pineapple, Balsmic and Rosemary Grilled Vegetables, and the absolute "time saving" travesty of Baked Asparagus. Yes, I'd do that last recipe if I bought asparagus and then realized I wasn't going to have time to cook it before the tips got slimy, but that saves no time!

And it does not solve my problem, which is recipes that can be COMPLETELY cooked, frozen in single servings, and popped into a lunch in the morning, to gently thaw by lunch. (I also have a microwave available at work, but if I don't have use it, so much the better.)

ARGH. Anyway, if you have any side dishes--preferably vegetable and grains (although I'm not fussed about meat/cheese/stock in them) that you know can be frozen in single servings and popped frozen into a lunch, or nuked to thaw (since I have a microwave at work), then please, link me! It works better to eat at room temps if they're highly seasoned, as flavors blossom when heated and get more dulled as foods get colder. (I have just finished a green bean dish that contains butter and lemon zest and...yeah, needed even more flavoring.)

In return I can offer you a few of the freezable bento recipes we've collected: Google Docs link

myrialux and I made a fabulous soup tonight. It's from a cookbook I've owned for close to 30 years, long enough that the spine cracked (ok, the glue's not great) and half the pages fell out so I bought another copy. There's several recipes in there that are standards in my repertoire.

I'd never made this one, though. Not sure why, other than I've only recently become a Soup Person (and I still prefer creamy soups to ones made of lots of stuff in a thin broth). But our not-quite-a-CSA delivered a pound of carrots to us, and I wanted potatoes, and between me marking several recipes and making myrialux go through them and narrow them down, we ended up with this one.

The book is A Passion for Potatoes (affiliate link) by Lydie Marshall. There's at least one other potato-based cookbook with the same title, by Paul Gaylor. I have that one also, but it just doesn't have the same place in my life.

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The Dirty Secret of Secret Family Recipes. Spoiler: the secret is that most of them come from the side of a jar or box.

My own grandmother's Secret Family Recipe(tm) for potato salad isn't a secret at all, she definitely got it from the side of the Dijonnaise bottle, and I loooove it. She told me right off that's where it was from, and I love telling people it's my grandmother's recipe, waiting for the usual "Those are the best kind" type of statement, then saying she got it off the Dijonnaise bottle. :)

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myrialux and I have been eating way too much fast food, mostly because we want to get out of the house at lunchtime, so we drive through various places and sit in the car while eating and listening to audiobooks.*

We're planning to try to refocus lunch onto things we can make and easily take with us and eat in the car while we park somewhere nearby and listen to audiobooks in the car.** Which means...bento! Made to be transported and eaten at room temperature.

All of this (the stuff above, the footnotes below) is all to explain why I purchased this book (affiliate link), although you probably didn't care. It's Bento Power, and I would say it's Japanese- and Asian-inspired rather than pure Japanese--good, given that I don't want to eat Japanese food every day for lunch.

It's more on the order of trendy health food and is mostly vegan with a few vegetarian elements (and a lot of gluten-free stuff if you're avoiding gluten). But the author doesn't appear to be afraid of flavor the way so many health food enthusiasts seem to be.

So far I've only made one recipe from the book, and that was for lunch today, topped with leftovers from a meal earlier this week. It's pretty simple: throw rice in the rice cooker with a handful of another grain (quinoa, because that's what we had) and a piece of kombu or shiitake mushroom to oomph up the umami. (We had both. I used both.)

I know I said she wasn't afraid of flavor and that's a bit on the bland side, but it served as a base for a couple of Chinese dishes we had that were loaded with garlic and ginger and a bit of chile, so it was Just Fine.

Anyway, the primary reason I'm mentioning it here is that the ebook is, at the moment, $1.99 and it's absolutely worth $1.99. The sample is unfortunately so loaded down with personal memoir and pantry stuff that it stops before it gets to actual recipes. Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Alibris if you want to get a used paper copy, though the one-star review on Amazon mentions that the text in the hardback is really small.

--

* Currently Harrow the Ninth. I pre-ordered the ebook and smashed through it the day it dropped, and am now enjoying a more leisurely re-read with the audiobook. It's a book that you really have to read twice, because a lot of clues to the revelations in the last 25% or so are fed throughout the first part, but you won't get a lot of them, and a lot of secondary meanings, until the second read-through.

I love books like this, but then again Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sunis in my top 10 favorite books for a reason.

** Walk to a park? This is Texas. It's hotter'n'hell outside and the cityscape is built around cars. Which means that we do have a park within walking distance...it has no tables, one bench on the end close to us that's a reasonable walking distance, and no shade over that bench. Plus, we couldn't listen to the audiobook there. :)

This week's CSA box:

Apple, Fuji (QTY 2)
Avocado - 1 ct
Banana - 3 ct
Grapefruit, Ruby Star (QTY 1)
Lettuce, Green Leaf - 1 ct
Nectarine, Yellow (QTY 2)
Onion, Green -1 Bunch (we got 2)
Orange, Navel - 3 ct
Sweet Potato -2 lb
Tomato, Roma - 1 lb

We are getting incredibly sick of bananas, which are in every box. Last weekend at the socially-distanced vintage trailer resort, we made Banana Boats, a desserty recipe I found. Slice bananas, through their skin, lengthwise almost all the way through, but leaving the skin on bottom intact. Pry them open and stuff whatever desserty things you have on hand in them. We did chocolate, caramel sauce, and marshmallows. Wrap them up in foil and toss 'em on a grill (or, I suppose, in an oven) until the stuff inside that can melt is melted. We topped them with crumbled graham crackers after they came out. The banana is basically mush, and mixed with everything else is quite good.

But we are so sick of banana bread, and I don't eat bananas raw because I burp banana for hours afterward. I also need to figure out what to do with the avocado that isn't guac or toast. Last week myrialux made (while I was prepping other food for the weekend) this avocado citrus salad which was delicious but a lot of work because neither of us really likes citrus membranes, so there was a lot of sectioning involved. (Well, myrialux can deal with them. I can't.)

I have not cooked this one, but it sounds good. From the terrible edition of The Joy of Cooking where the publishers threw out the heart of the book and put in a bunch of new recipes. It's a perfectly good cookbook. It's not the Joy

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Toby's making an Italian sausage marinara. It's this vegan recipe with sweet Italian sausage instead of the mushrooms because we only have 8 ounces of mushrooms and didn't want a recipe that overwhelmed them. It'll be put over gnocchi because we have gnocchi that need to be eaten.

We've got a loaf of Whole Wheat Honey Bread going in the breadmaker (do NOT believe them about the 80°F temp for the liquid ingredients. You want what your yeast says).

And I've just made an experimental batch of sweet treats by riffing off of this recipe for Chocolate-Marshmallow Clusters.

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Dinner’s cooking now. Made Sourdough-Like Beer Bread in the bread machine (recipe has instructions for a number of methods, not just bread machines.

https://redstaryeast.com/recipes/sourdough-like-beer-bread/

Note that the temperature the liquid should be is WRONG. Maybe Red Star yeast requires lower temperatures, but I’ve never used it. Use the temp your yeast recommends.

It’s cooling now and smells AMAZING.

The entree is Butter Bean-Cider Cassoulet:

https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2018/02/01/butterbean-cider-cassoulet-recipe/

We found one last bag of frozen speckled butter beans (a variety of Lima beans) in the vast emptiness of the frozen vegetable section of the grocery store this morning, so I used about 400g/14ish oz of them. Also chicken stock instead of veg stock because that’s what we have. There’s probably a reason for slowly adding the stock over an hour and a half, but I couldn’t be bothered, so tipped it all in.

I used regular paprika because I forgot to add the notes to our recipe app where she explains she used it to replace the smokiness. I’d have used our smoked paprika if I’d remembered.

And I did NOT use an entire head of garlic, but did use about six fat cloves.

It’s all smelling wonderful.