Tag Archives: roasted potatoes

Roasted chickpeas, potatoes and tomatoes

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Roasted chickpeas, potatoes and tomatoes with sage and rosemary

Roasted chickpeas, potatoes and tomatoes with sage and rosemary

Thoreau famously warned us to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” As I was going about my chores this morning, thinking my confused thoughts, I came up with my own version. “Beware of any enterprise that requires you to stifle your sense of compassion.” Beware of any occupation that requires you to think of other lives as less valuable than your own life. Beware of any undertaking that requires you to treat people in a way you wouldn’t treat the people you most love. Beware of any job that forces you to think of people as enemies. If you’re being trained that the suffering of strangers is less tragic than the suffering of your friends, quit your training. Beware of anybody that asks you to respond to any situation with only anger and fear. Beware of anybody that tells you love, pity, and empathy are signs of weakness. Beware of any goal that requires cruelty or thoughtlessness to achieve. Beware of anyone that asks you to act without understanding.

    It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. – Albert Camus

So! Tiny new potatoes, chickpeas and tomatoes, all tossed together with shallots, garlic and olive oil. Seasoned with rosemary and sage, and roasted till crispy and caramelized. Delicious! This smells so good while you’re cooking it. I like potatoes and tomatoes together, for some reason it seems very summery and harvesty to me. We’re not there yet, obviously, so this is like a wish or a preview. This would be nice in summer with chopped ripe tomatoes, but for the time being I used little sweet grape tomatoes. They became almost like sundried tomatoes. Rich and flavorful. The first time we ate this, it was crispy and firm. The second time, I added some white wine at the end, used it to scrape up all the nice caramelly bits, covered it, and cooked it till everything was tender. It was very nice both ways! We ate it on a bed of baby spinach and arugula. Lovely.

Here’s Compassion, by Nina Simone.

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Roasted cauliflower, potatoes and butterbeans in spicy red pepper – olive sauce

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Roasted potatoes, cauliflower and butterbeans with spicy red pepper sauce

Roasted potatoes, cauliflower and butterbeans with spicy red pepper sauce

When a child tells a joke (my child, at any rate) he always explains it. He always adds a little, “do you see what I did there?” (Except when they tell knock knock jokes, of course – not because they need no explanation, but because there is no explanation. They make no sense, and that’s the point of them.) As they get a little older they might just send it out there into the world, and see how it plays. They start to understand the universal language of jokes, and they recognize that others understand it as well. And if it plays well, they’ll repeat it, over and over and over again. There’s a regular at the bar where I work. He’s a friendly, loquacious guy, and everybody’s always happy to see him, as befits his status as regular. He tells jokes that aren’t always appropriate, and he lets us know they’re not appropriate by saying, “If you know what I mean.” One day, the bartender said, “Everybody always knows what you mean!” She said it in a jolly, joking way, but he seemed a little chastened. He was uncharacteristically silent for a few minutes. When I think about it, which I frequently do, it’s so odd that we can communicate at all. Words are so frustratingly, beautifully inadequate. Either they seem to have no meaning at all, or they have so many meanings you don’t know which to choose. We could lose ourselves in the space between what we mean to say or what we want to say, and what is actually said. We watched Tokyo Story by Ozu yesterday. (Beautiful!) His films are about regular, contemporary people facing problems that we all face, and one of these is, simply, talking to one another, conveying meaning. The characters are speaking Japanese, of course, which is a language I don’t understand, but they’re so clearly sharing the difficulty of sharing, with their gestures and expressions. They use small sounds, single syllables or grunts, that seem to carry more meaning, and be better understood, than whole streams of words. I love this! Each person fills the syllable with their own inflections, the whole force of their personality. Ozu will show one side of a phone call that consists of nothing but these short grunts, and you know what the person on the other end is saying. I read a little bit about these sounds, and they each have their own written character, which is a beautiful thing. I suppose we have something similar in English, but our small sounds, our ums and ers and uh-huhs seem to create little spaces of non-meaning, little expressions of frustration with meaning. Or maybe it’s just easier to see meaning when you’re less entangled in the words, when you’re outside, looking in.

It’s funny how recipes can become construed and misconstrued, made up, as they are, of words. The symbols I take as universal are very confusing to some people. And measurements are so changing and mysterious, especially when you’re talking about the size of a vegetable! In recipes such as this one, it’s okay that the measurements are vague. You can adjust the amounts to your taste. We have roasted potatoes, cauliflower and roasted butter beans (yummy!) And we have a sauce to toss them in, and you can roast just as much of each as you like! You can mix everything together, and fry it in a skillet till the sauce is fairly dry and coating each piece, and that’s tasty. Or you can leave the elements separate, and let people take what they like, which is what we did, because not everyone in the family is as enthusiastic about cauliflower. We ate this with simple herbed farro, and some sauteed kale and broccoli rabe tossed with lemon and butter.

Here’s the Tokyo Story Theme, by Saito Kojun

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Rosemary roasted potatoes, tomatoes, and shallots

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Roasted potatoes, tomatoes, and shallots

We went for a family bike ride this morning. David went on ahead with Malcolm, and I stayed behind with Isaac. He’s got short legs and a small bike, and he peddles four times for every one of mine. As exercise for me, this was a failure. The heart rate was not elevated, what with all the coasting and standing and waiting. As a ride to get somewhere, it was a failure. Isaac decided at one point that he had to stop to renew his energy. And that was as far as we got. As a chance to stand in a place that you love with somebody that you love, and notice everything going on around you, it was a huge success. The towpath is lush and green this time of year, and the trees meet overhead, sewn together with vines, so that you find yourself in a green tunnel, punctuated by spaces of shadow and spaces of bright light. As we stood surrounded by smells of lavender and lemon and wet earth, the clouds rolled by, making shadows that drifted through the tunnel like slow trains. The difference between light and dark evened as they passed overhead, and then jumped into sharp relief when they’d gone by. It was a giddy feeling of moving and standing still at the same time. Isaac said it must be the end of summer, because yellow leaves were slowly falling all around us. He asked, “Do you remember that time that you weren’t there…?” (I love the logic of this question) And he told the story of how they’d gone for a walk, and gotten lost, and climbed over a tree in the river. He said that day they’d eaten a breakfast of eggs, and then right away they ate dinner. A small moth landed on my knee, it felt like a blessing. Golden and dusky. It looked up at me with its sweet, speaking face, and slowly showed me how its wings opened in a strange and beautiful fashion. It held them open, it held them closed. Isaac wanted to catch him, but I wouldn’t let him. He said I liked the moth more than him, and he threw his bike on the ground and ran down the path, his bright yellow helmet bobbing up and down in the light and the shadows. I caught up to him and he said he was too tired. One tear rolled down each of his perfect cheeks. With a beautiful gesture, he reached up two fingers of one hand, and touched each tear with one finger. A tiger swallowtail flew circles around us, dappled like the day, and Isaac said that it flew the way we ride our bikes, flapping then floating, flapping then floating. Malcolm and David, who had made it to the next town and back again, overtook us. David went home at Isaac’s slow pace, and I got to ride home with Malcolm, who chattered merry nonsense, and darted through waves of sunlight like a little minnow, resplendent in bright red and bright green, on his bright Tintin blue bike.

It’s August! Summer is ripe. I can’t tell you how excited I am about the vegetables this time of year. Tomatoes, shallots, potatoes, garlic. I love them all! I love them together! I decided to roast them – the potatoes by themselves till crispy, and the tomatoes, shallots, and garlic together till meltingly soft and starting to caramelize – and then stir them together at the last minute with lots of black pepper. I love how simple this is, and how it all works together.

We have a guest DJ today. My friend SpottedRichard put together an excellent playlist of Latin music, and I’m going to link to that, because it’s bright and sunny, and helping to wake me up. So here it is!
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Grilled vegetables and pecan tarragon sauce

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Roasted beets & mushrooms

We’ve been watching the Olympic trials at work, on a big television above the bar. The sound is turned all the way down, and for some reason, in this way, it becomes the most beautiful drama. The expressions on the athletes’ faces are so raw and honest – pure, distilled emotion. It reminds me of silent films, when the actors’ gestures and expressions had to tell the story, except that this is entirely unstudied. It’s hard to tell at first who has won and who has lost, because the faces are oddly similar – anguished, ecstatic, exhausted. Their faces are like children’s faces in delight and sorrow – undulled and unguarded. It’s very emotional! I have to stop myself from getting weepy right there at the host stand! I love the idea of working very hard for one thing, and putting so much emotion and energy into it. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately – it’s good to have a grand project in your life.

When I was little we lived in England one summer, during the Olympics. To my shame, I remember being actually bewildered that the announcers spoke more about English athletes than Americans. Didn’t everybody in the world care more about our superior American athletes even than their own? Didn’t they? Heh heh. With independence day drawing on apace, it’s probably a good time to examine our place in the world as Americans and as human beings. Luckily for you I have to go to work in a short while, so I’ll talk about grilling vegetables instead. We grilled beets, mushrooms, and potatoes. Of course you could grill any vegetables you like, but I recommend this combination. The beets and mushrooms have a nice juiciness, everything is crispy, earthy, smoky and delicious. I like a simple marinade for grilled vegetables. Olive oil, vinegar, fresh herbs and garlic. I added some nigella seeds because I just got them for the first time and I’m very excited about them! But if you can’t find them you could live without. We also sauteed the beet greens with some chard, and I used zatar spices, because I just bought sumac, and I’m very excited about that, too!! And the pecan tarragon tarrator sauce is a lovely, creamy, vegan, subtly flavored sauce that goes very sweetly with the earthy grilled vegetables. Malcolm ate his grilled vegetables on toast, and he made it into Darth Vador’s Tie Fighter. (serving suggestion)

Beet tie fighter


Here’s a little film of Louis Armstrong playing Stuttin with some Barbecue, and dancing with Velma Middleton.

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Black barley with baby kale (and roasted mushrooms, potatoes & pecans)

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Barley & kale

I know I shouldn’t go on about it, but it’s on my mind. My dog died a couple of months ago. I still miss her everyday. I still look for her each morning, where her bed used to be. I dream about her incessantly. I’ve dreamt of her as a puppy, I’ve dreamt that she’s lost or not well, and I can’t save her, I’ve dreamt that she never died at all. The strangest dream was probably the most like actual life. She died, and I missed her, and it felt so unaccountable. Why do the most literal dreams feel so odd? I don’t want another dog, I really don’t. But I miss canine companionship. Our house feels so human, somehow, without her. The other day Isaac said, “Mom, you can’t just go up and pet every dog you see!” And he’s probably right, but that’s what I’ve been doing, and trying not to think that Steenbeck would have gone crazy if I’d gone home smelling like another dog. So yesterday, when I went to get the boys from school, and I saw a tiny, dark, bundle of puppyhood…I attacked it. I dropped everything (literally! it’s lucky no little children were standing below me because my umbrella is quite pointy). I grabbed it. Oh, the soft, round little belly. The hot little body, the racing heart. The little puppy eyes and ears! The puppy smell!!!! She didn’t really want to be held by me – she wanted to be running around, with the kids her own age. But I wasn’t taking the hint. I couldn’t let her go. My boys looked at me with sideways, skeptical looks. “Who is that?” they asked? The little kids who actually owned the dog danced around me, looking anxious. “When is she going to give it back?” they asked their nanny. Never! I cried. But I did. I put her down. The little dog was sort of blacky brown. She had that short, dark fur that looks almost purple or blue in certain lights. In other words, she looked like black barley. You see? There is a connection. Barley would be a good name for a dog, wouldn’t it?

This black barley dish is almost like a risotto, but like a risotto made by a very lazy person that didn’t want to make a broth or stir it every minute of the day. The barley is cooked till it’s tender but toothsome (if that means al dente). And it makes its own creamy sort of sauce, just like a risotto. I warmed some butter and white wine and herbs in a big frying pan, and added the barley with its creamy broth. Then I added some water and let that cook down a bit. I found baby kale at the grocery store, and I was quite excited about it. It does have a kale taste, but not as assertively. It has a little bite. I cooked it for much less time than I usually cook kale – I tossed it into the barley broth towards the end, and cooked till it was nicely wilted. (You could easily use regular kale, cooked first, or baby spinach, which wouldn’t need to be cooked at all.) I also made roasted mushrooms and tiny crispy roasted potatoes, to toss on the dish. And I toasted some pecans. I like all of these tastes together – and they all go so well with sage, rosemary and thyme, which I used to flavor pretty much every element involved. I topped mine with some crumbled bleu cheese, too, which added a lovely creamy/salty element, but nobody else in my family did, cause they’re not fans of the bleu cheese. The whole thing added up to a very savory, meaty meal – the smell of barley and roasted mushrooms lingered in my house all evening. It’s a nice smell!

Here’s Rebecca Sugar with Sleepy Puppies. I think it’s lovely!
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Honey roasted potato salad with arugula and pecans

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Honey roasted potato salad

I had the strangest moment yesterday. I went to buy a loaf of bread on a balmy spring evening. A time of year and a time of day that you can feel things changing all around you. I saw a boy walking toward me on the street. He’s very tall, taller than me, and I was hit by a powerful memory of seeing him asleep in a crib ten years ago. We were living in Boston, but planned to move to this town, and his mother was showing us around the apartment that would be our home for two years – all through my first pregnancy and the first year of Malcolm’s life. I thought of how hopeful we were then, and how different. I thought of how happy we’d have been to know we’d be living here now, and to know about our boys. I imagined myself then, seeing myself walking down the street on a spring evening, feeling so at home. And I thought about my dog, who had been such a good friend to me at that time, and who had been very well-behaved when we met our future landlady, and who died a month ago. It was such an odd, slowly-passing moment, which combined the past and the present, the present as the future. It hit me hard!

That moment of tension, the feeling of things changing, is what makes spring and fall so exciting – why they make you feel alive. And now, you’re wondering, how is she going to make this about potato salad? Well, friends, this potato salad is like an edible little mix of contradicting factors that work well together. Roasted potatoes are such a cool weather food, arugula salads so warm weather. The warmth of the potatoes contrasts with the coolness of the arugula, and even wilts it slightly. The potatoes are pleasantly soft, the pecans and roasted lentils delightfully crispy. And the mellow sweetness of roasted honey and balsamic plays against the peppery sharpness of arugula and water cress. Ta da!!

Here’s Cymande with Changes. A remarkable song!

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