Express risotto

Arborio rice

Do you love risotto, but hesitate to make it because of all the time it takes to prepare over the stove? Here's a recipe to do it in the microwave. It still takes at least 20 minutes, but you'll have most of the time to prepare other parts of your dinner while it cooks.


Microwave risotto
4 servings

Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 shallots or one small onion, finely chopped
1 large garlic clove, peeled and minced
1 cup Arborio rice
2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
1/2 cup dry vermouth
4 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions
Stir together the oil, garlic and rice in a medium glass bowl, and microwave, uncovered, for 3 minutes
Mix in the broth and wine, cover, and microwave for 16 minutes. Stir to see if broth is absorbed and risotto is creamy. If it's still too wet, microwave for another 2 to 5 minutes, then stir in the Parmesan cheese and serve. If it's too dry when you check it and the grains are still firm, add a little broth and return to the microwave for a couple of minutes before adding the cheese.

You can stir in other vegetables or meat, cooked, when you add the cheese.

E-mail fixed ( I hope)

The coffee cup has gone, but hopefully the e-mail subscription is working now and won't send you to a page in China. (Let's just say I'm not really good with coding and leave it at that. I'll try to stick to writing from now on.)

Tweaking away

If you clicked on the coffee cup to the right and are wondering what happened, please try again later today. I'm trying to get Feedburner to add email subscriptions but it's been giving me trouble. Sorry!

Fish for breakfast

Kippers for breakfast?

Cheap Trick sang about breakfast fish on "Breakfast in America":
Could we have kippers for breakfast
Mummy dear, mummy dear?

So what did the teenagers in our group order for breakfast while we were hiking through England a few years ago? Kippers. And how did they like them? Not.

Fish is a hard sell for breakfast in America, except maybe in Hawaii. (When you're surrounded by fish, it always tastes good.) But when we stayed in Helsinki, the breakfast buffet included several kinds of fish, and all very tasty. Certainly a lot more appetizing than the Russian fried eggs we had been eating for the past couple of weeks by then; the typical Russian way of fixing a fried egg is to put it in a tiny hot skillet with butter or grease, then serve it before the white even has time to congeal. So you had a crusty bottom that was hard to cut even with a knife, and a runny, jiggly top. No wonder keffir is a popular breakfast drink there; the Lactobacillus probably keeps them from getting sick from the raw egg.

But fish is good for you, and to cut it out of your diet for what mom called the most important meal of the day is just foolish. Some traditions aren't worth standing on.

So if you're up for a little adventure, try these salt cod fritters. Salt cod, unfortunately, is sold by the pound, and is quite dear unless you figure that you actually are getting two pounds of fish for your money, since the salt removes the water weight from the cod. The good news is that salt cod keeps indefinitely in your refrigerator, awaiting an overnight soak (and several changes of water if you want to remove all the salt).

Lori K's salt-cod fritters
Serves 2

Salt cod fritters

Ingredients
1/4 pound salt cod
1 small shallot or two scallions
1/4 cup flour
Dash cayenne pepper
1 egg
Oil
Sauce
1/2 large ripe avocado
Juice of 1/2 lemon or lime
1 tablespoon water
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
Soak the cod overnight. When you awake, drain it, slice it into thin strips, put it back in the bowl and cover with hot water.
Mince the shallot or scallion (using the crisp green part is OK).
Heat about an inch of oil in a cast-iron pot (a deep one will reduce splattering) until hot but not smoking over medium heat. Sprinkle flour with the cayenne pepper in a small deep bowl. In another small bowl, beat the egg well. Drain the cod strips and wring out the water, then mince. Mix the flour and the egg, fold in the cod and shallot or scallion. Drop by tablespoons into the hot oil, making sure they don't touch. When brown on one side, flip them over, cook for a few minutes, then drain.
While they're cooking, make the sauce:
Mash the avocado, add the citrus juice, then enough water to make it smooth, and season.
Serve over the fritters. Eat them while they're hot!

Peaches and pancakes

Peaches' fuzzy faces are with us for a short time only as fresh, but they drip with delight on that day they are ripe. The day before, they are tart and firm; the day after, mushy and rotting. So carpe persica, and enjoy them while they are at their peak.

Even if your peaches have started on their slide into the slime side, often you can cut out the bad and enjoy the ripe rest of them. Here's a way to turn them into an excellent topping for ice cream, or if you're having pancakes for breakfast, use them instead of, or along with, maple syrup.

Lori K's Peach Jammin'
Serves 2

Ingredients
1 cup of fresh peaches, chopped
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon crystalized ginger

Instructions
Put all the ingredients in a heat-proof bowl and mix well. Microwave for 1 minute, stir and repeat, until the peaches are soft. They will get syrupy as they cook. Serve warm over pancakes or ice cream.

Pee Wee's Pit BBQ's last squeal

Hatton Ferry, c. 1910. The last poled ferry
in the United States, it's still in operation.

The recession has been tough on restaurants, especially the small ones. Scottsville, which doesn't have much of a draw outside of the historic Hatton Ferry and canoeing on the James River, had a pretty good barbecue joint, Pee Wee's Pit BBQ, but if you haven't been there in the last five years, you better get down there before the end of the month, because it's closing. They have tasty pulled pork sandwiches, fried chicken and fried pulled-pork-and-cabbage-balls they call pork puppies and serve with a sweet-savory sauce. The one thing they don't have is a pit; the pork's done in a slow cooker. It's open daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Convenience ... or flavor?

This headline was the main one on the cover of the Washington Post food section this week. It referred to watermelon (seedless mild ones vs. intensely flavored seeded ones), but it occurred to me that it could be the standard by which to judge all our food choices. Dietitians have been advocating intentional eating (along with 30 minutes of exercise a day) as necessary to keep a healthy weight. To paraphrase Michael Pollan: Eat food, not too much, and enjoy it more.

Preparation is a key to the enjoyment. If you keep that in mind, you've won half the battle our culture is fighting against. We rush, rush to get more done, cutting every corner we can find. The food industry has responded to this, preparing and processing our food so we can get in our mouths quickly. Yet while we are cutting the time it takes to put together our dinners, the industry is cutting corners as well to make a profit.

Good chefs fight against processed foods. No wonder we love to eat out at a good restaurant. The food is spectacularly attractive and tastes great.

And that's why books by chefs sell well. We've eaten it, we want to fix it. Unfortunately, most of the recipes in a chef's cookbook involve intense preparation. And why not? That's what the minimum-wage minions in the kitchen do (besides the dishes... which add up to a substantial number for many of these recipes). And on top of that, some just don't translate well to the home kitchen. I knew from experience that adapting family recipes to feed a hundred or more people takes a lot of tweaking, especially with the spices. And what I learned testing cookbooks over the years is that many chefs find great cookbook writers and testers to produce their works, but others rush to press without adequately testing whether the recipes, even when followed to the letter, will turn out well for their readers.

Good recipes don't need a lot of ingredients to taste great, but the simpler the recipe, the better your ingredients need to be. If you don't enjoy food prep, start with recipes that call for five ingredients or less. Work up from there. Pay attention to how fresh the pepper is as you cut into it to dice it (a good tipoff is the condition of the stem; if the tip is black and shriveled, it's been off the vine for some time), how little flavor the pithy parts contribute (cut them out and throw them into the compost pile),  how a smaller dice exposes more of the surface to flavor the dish. Don't enjoy cutting onions? Goggles work well, but chilling the onion or putting a slice of bread in your mouth before taking out your knife sometimes works as well. Does that garlic that keeps jumping out from under your knife need to be minced? Position the side of your chef knife on top of the clove and give it a good whack with your free fist. Then mince the crushed garlic.

Embrace the prep. If you think of it as the essential element of getting better food into your body, you will value it as much as you value your time. It's when you don't value it that it becomes mere scut work. Cultivate sacredness in your daily meal preparation, and your meals - and your body - will rejoice.