sweet-potato chili

This is a quarantine favorite in my house. It can be made vegetarian or with meat, and it can be made hot or sweet.

Par-boil a half-pound of dried beans of any kind for about an hour in a 250 F (120 C) oven (or you can use a can of beans instead). When they are nearly finished, burn a large onion or two medium onions, chopped to bean size, and a large sweet potato, or a couple small ones, chopped to bean size, in olive oil in a pot. If you are going to use spicy sausage, like chorizo, burn it in the pot after the onions. You want to leave some dark burned bits on the bottom of the pot at this stage!

Add a chopped sweet pepper, some chipotle peppers (dried or from a can) if you want it hot, about 1 tbsp of chili powder and about 1/2 tbsp of cumin and about 1 tbsp of salt. Add water to cover, get it to a boil, and then put it in the oven at 250 F (120 C) for an hour. At the end, beat it up a bit with a fork to get the sweet potato to break up and become the body of the stew.

Possible modifications include: Try other kinds of meat, or even try a new plant-based meat alternative. Increase or reduce hot peppers, or use fresh jalapenos. Add tomato paste perhaps? Or maybe tabasco or vinegar for some acid. It's extremely forgiving, and the quantities of everything are up to you.

Serve with sour cream or yoghurt and chopped cilantro. Serves eight-ish.

pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes

It being end of summer and all, and me being over-confident in my no-recipe kitchen skills, I did the following today: I softened up two chopped onions and a bit of red pepper (because it was there) in a stick of butter. I then filled the pot with halved tomatoes (maybe 15 tomatoes) that the 'fuzz brought me from the Union Square Farmer's Market. I didn't peel the tomatoes first because (a) it isn't rocket science, and (b) I know I will be able to fish out the peels later. I added two cloves of garlic (smacked), 1 tbsp of red-wine vinegar, some fresh basil, some sprigs of fresh thyme, and a lot of salt and pepper (and a bit of that Japanese hot spice I have for ramen).

I started this all cooking. The tomatoes immediately released a lot of water and their skins, which I fished out (easily). I then executed the ultimate total-neglect move: I put the pot, uncovered, into a 275 F (135 C) oven and waited, stirring once an hour.

After 3 hours I pulled it out, pulled out the thyme sprigs, mashed the rest (with a potato masher) and then put it on the stovetop to reduce it further. That is, it wasn't thick enough (for my taste). Next time I'll do it at 300, not 275, with the hope that it will come out thicker. But it tastes great!

Recipes on the internet say you should peel and then seed the tomatoes before starting. I'm not sure why.

sweet and sour meatballs

As I was walking around the grocery store yesterday, a pound of ground veal whispered "meatballs" to me. I was thinking Swedish, but ended up making this, which was a huge hit with all: 1 lb ground beef 1 lb ground veal 1 cup bread crumbs 2 eggs 1.5 tsp salt 1 tsp pepper 1/2 cup very finely chopped onions I made small (1") meatballs of this mixture and browned them in a 12" pan (they all fit with a little jiggle room). In a large saucepan, I made the sweet-and-sour sauce with the following: 1 cup rice vinegar 3/4 cup brown sugar 2 tbsp ketchup 1 tbsp soy sauce Juice from 14 oz can of pineapple chunks 4 tsp corn starch in a slurry with 1/4 cup water I added the meatballs to this and kept it all simmering. Sauteed a green pepper and a red pepper in the frypan and added this and the pineapple chunks to the sauce. Served over white rice. This hits both the sweet and the sour buttons very hard.

ratatouille

Here's what I did (with some help from the 'fuzz) to make the simplest possible ratatouille with all our farmer's-market late-summer vegetables:

• 2 onions, sliced
• 6 small eggplants (or 2-3 huge supermarket-style ones), diced
• 3 zucchini, diced
• a few sweet peppers, seeded and diced
• 3 large tomatoes, diced
• a few tbsp fresh basil, chopped
• salt, pepper, olive oil

Soften the onions (and maybe some garlic) in a lot of olive oil. Add eggplant and cook until it starts to soften. Add zucchini and peppers and cook until the zucchini starts to soften. Add tomatoes and basil and a fair bit of salt and pepper and simmer until the whole thing turns into ratatouille (about an hour, maybe less). Fix seasoning at the end. Serve with crusty bread, and then freeze some for the coming winter.

salmon and vegetables

Salmon, which is a gloriously fatty fish, takes well to the same treatment as those chicken thighs in "chicken and vegetables".

• Rub salmon fillets with olive oil, lay in a sheet pan (roasting pan, big cast iron frypan or what have you) and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. I allow about 200 g of fish per person, but of course we really like our fish around here. Skin on or off, doesn't matter; this treatment does nothing for the skin (you need pan frying for that).
• Nestled in the pan are "the vegetables", ie. anything that will be cooked to your satisfaction in the same time as the fish. See below.
• Fire this into a blazing hot oven (say, 450) for about 15 minutes.
• Very good with a simple yoghurt sauce: good, thick plain yoghurt, salt, pepper and optionally some ground roasted cumin (this is extremely good) and lemon zest.

I pull the fish out when it's two-thirds done; residual heat does the rest in the five minutes it takes to get things on plates and get kids to the table. "Done" for me would probably be sent back by 1 in 3 customers in a restaurant, although these same people readily eat salmon raw in sushi. Human folly!

As for the vegetables, tonight we had oven-candied tomatoes I still had in the freezer from last summer, thinly sliced red onions and kalamata olives. The onions had time to get soft and a bit brown here and there. I learned to do salmon this way from The Naked Chef, where he used blanched green beans, cherry tomatoes, dry cured olives, torn tender herbs (like basil) and anchovy fillets.

Ideas to try...soon:

• sliced potato (1/8") and onion with some thyme
• zuccini and red pepper strips
• baby beets?