Dogs and Shoes

Presto: Kale Pesto

The title of this post pretty much says it all: kale--raw kale--makes for a great pesto. It's yummy, easy to whip up, a lovely green and surprisingly flexible. It's great to make when it's too hot to really cook, or when you're feeling a little lazy, or when you want vegetables in a form that doesn't involve chewing. It stores well, too, so it's good way to use up a bunch of greens that are going to turn the corner soon, even if you don't plan on eating them right away. 

I came up with this kale magic on my very own, and then later realized lots of other folks, including 101 Cookbooks and Love & Lemons, have posted super-similar recipes with far nicer pictures. I think for some of us, a bunch of greens, a Cuisinart and 15 minutes in a row just shouts, "Kale pesto!"

Anyway, here's the recipe, which takes 15 - 20 minutes, including cleanup, and makes 1 - 2 cups of pesto (or enough for at least pasta for four):

• A handful (maybe 1/2 cup) any kind of nuts, toasted. Walnuts, pinenuts, almonds, pecans are all good candidates, but feel free to use whatever you have on hand.
• A clove of garlic, roughly chopped.
• A sprinkle of salt.
• 1 bunch any kind of kale; washed, dried and very loosely chopped (or loosely chop it and then wash and dry in a salad spinner);  don't tell anyone, but I don't bother to remove the stems. This recipe also works nicely with arugula, baby collards, swiss chard, spinach, mustard greens and their friends. It even works with asparagus and snap peas.
• Olive oil--maybe 1/3 cup.
• Juice of a half lemon, plus zest of the whole lemon.
• About 1/2  cup or so grated parmesan (or one of its cousins--asiago, pecorino romano, etc); optional.

Into a food processor, toss the nuts, garlic and a little salt. Whir it briefly to get a grainy paste, then throw in the kale. While the greens are twirling their way down, slowly pour in a little olive oil to make it creamy, and then add a splash of lemon juice and the lemon zest. At this point, you can add grated parmesan into the mix, or you can leave that out for a vegan/freezable version. Taste and adjust salt/lemon/olive oil as needed. Presto: pesto.

Bonus for lethargy over-acheivers: If you're adding grated cheese, you can pulse it in the food processor before you start everything else (remove it before the first step above, and then add it back in at the end, or it all gets a bit gunky). Although the food processor turns hard cheese into tiny pebbles, rather than ethereal flakes, it's tough to notice that in a pesto, and this method saves you from having to wash the grater.

Bonus for actual over-acheivers and people who find raw greens to be bitter: you could blanch the greens first to leach out the bitterness and then proceed. I don't taste the bitter note in greens, so I never do this. 

Here's what you can do with this pesto:

* Have it over pasta--regular or whole wheat or whatever--or over polenta or over rice. Include some steamed or sauteed veggies, or not. Serve with parmesan or one of its cousins. (If you serve it over pasta, scoop out a little pasta water, maybe 1/2 cup, to drizzle over the pesto/pasta combo and make it creamier.)

* Make it the basis of the dressing for a white bean and/or chickpea salad and/or grain salad (try white wine vinegar or more lemon here).

* Slather it on toasted bread with slices of tofu or cheese or a handful of white beans.

* Add dollops of it to a plain frittata, as shown here, or an omelette. 

* Serve it as a crudite dip.

* Freeze it and use it later. Real recipe writers always say that things like, "Pesto lasts for up to a month frozen." I have tested those limits and found that pesto will go six months, really no prob. 

* If you want to store it in the fridge--where it will last happily for about a week, give or take--put it in a container, and then slick the top with olive oil, which will keep it nice and green.

I Am George Zimmerman

In the weeks since Trayvon Martin’s execution, we’ve seen many, many people of color identifying with Trayvon and his parents, speaking up about the pain and danger of living in a country where there’s widespread perception that brown skin is threatening.

Here’s what we haven’t seen: a lot of white people examining their own perceptions about brown skin. 

Given that much of the discussion so far has focused on the history and patterns of racism that Trayvon’s death appears to fit into--and that a lot of us white folks have decried those patterns--it’s striking that so many people have come forward to identify with Martin and so few with George Zimmerman. If we aren’t the ones perpetuating racism, who is?

It would be easy here to say that old-school Southern whites, white cops, white gun proponents and Geraldo Rivera fans (not to mention white people who own hoodie companies) are the ones responsible for a toxic environment. Indeed, if we’re to be anti-racist allies, it’s important that we recognize whites’ racist behaviors and that we call them out.

But by presuming that they--including Zimmerman, and the cops who failed to arrest him, and the legislators and NRA/ALEC supporters who championed “Stand Your Ground”-- are some other, evil brand of white people, those of us who say we want a truly equitable society miss the opportunity to look at ourselves and see how our behaviors contribute to a world where few are surprised when an unarmed child is killed on a residential street.

It’s uncomfortable to consider, but it’s not just the other white people whose attitudes and actions draw forward the American legacy of racism.

Personally, I gained a nice sense of self-satisfaction by joining a lot of other people, white and of color, in condemning Zimmerman’s apparent racism and the laws and police behavior that backed him up. After all, I don’t own a gun, I’m generally suspicious of police, I wouldn’t vote for a politician who supported pro-gun or SYG laws. I mean, c’mon, I give money to incredible organizations that fight for equal justice. I prefer a racially diverse Hunger Games! I tweeted about Doug Shipman’s terrific TEDx talk on community and diversity--which I found because I follow black men on Twitter! I’m. A. Good. Person. A good white person, at that.

And yet, as Tim Wise pointed out this past Sunday on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, the research on hidden bias reveals that we all, regardless of skin color, carry innate biases. Whether we become aware of them is often a matter of privilege. How we choose to act is another question altogether.

So there I was a few evenings ago, in a part of my neighborhood that’s pretty far from the trains and the cute shops, on a block near the BQE that has some well-maintained buildings but also a handful of empty lots and abandoned buildings. I was with a lost dog that some other neighbors had found wandering on its own earlier in the day, and I was asking around, looking for its people. Miraculously, I found the owners--which meant that I was walking home alone at dusk.

I had my phone out to text a neighbor about the dog. It’s a new phone, about two weeks old, flat and flashy. As I leaned on a building to type, a young black man walked by me. I noticed that he was a lot bigger than I am and that he was wearing a hoodie. Here’s what I thought: he could have been Trayvon. And then: oh, there’s been a rash of phone thefts in the neighborhood. And then I put my phone in my pocket until he passed. Two minutes earlier, when a young white woman in a hoodie had passed, I thought: cute shoes! And I continued texting. (NB: Although I’ve read that Fort Greene has had a mini-epidemic of phone thefts, I haven’t read a word describing the thieves.)

A quiz: In a mixed-race, gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood at 6p in the evening, with a bunch of people of all kinds around, who feels safer on the street: the 40-something white woman or the 20-something black man?

Ok, ok, false dichotomy, trick question. Everyone needs to stay aware and stay safe, yadda yadda. Point is, if we’re paying attention to Trayvon’s death, rather than to, say, The Wire, we could reasonably conclude that the young black man was not a phone thief or any kind of predator and that he might have felt threatened by my likely ability to draw sympathy from nearby cops (if he’d noticed me at all, which, honestly, I have no idea--but narcissism being what it is, I’m going to go with his having been aware of me).

It was the smallest of interactions, which means this isn’t a big risk for me to admit, but in it, I could have been the George Zimmerman.

Now I’m wondering: What are the more significant interactions where I overinterpret race, and how else can I behave?

--

I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this blog. Seeing as the internet tends to draw vile comments on race, however, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness.  

 

It's Impossible to Stop Eating This

When I was in college and learning to cook, I became enamored of a Craig Claibourne recipe for colcannon--a traditional Irish dish that mixes potatoes and kale or cabbage. I hadn't grown up eating colcannon, I didn't use that particular cookbook very much, and this was in the years before I considered establishing a religion based on kale, so I'm not sure how I even hit on the recipe. But I'm guessing I was trying to use up some potatoes, and Claibourne's short write-up appealed to me because it had just seven ingredients, including salt and pepper, and it looked easy.

"Easy" undersells the virtues of this creation. Not only can you make it with the skills you'll have acquired by the second time you've attempted to cook, it's forgiving and versatile. If you boil the potatoes too long, no problem. If you undercook the kale, nobody gets hurt. If you don't feel like peeling the potatoes, totally fine. If you use sweet potatoes (or yellow potatoes, or even rutabagas) instead of white potatoes, all to the good. If you don't have milk on hand,  or if you're vegan, you can just substitute in the potato cooking water (I probably don't need to mention that vegans can swap in olive oil for the butter). If you toss in cabbage instead of kale, you've just made "bubble and squeak"--the English version of this dish, which ought to win a prize for delightful names. You can profitably throw in tofu, and I've seen colcannon recipes that include pork.

Here's the other great thing about this recipe: it uses ingredients you can get at the farmers' market far into the winter. And those ingredients are usually pretty cheap.

Oh, and also? It's delicious. Impossible-to-stop-eating delicious. Claibourne's recipe says it serves six. Presumably, that's six people with no taste buds. 

So for all of these reasons, I started making colcannon regularly--very, very regularly. I tried other recipes, but most didn't include Claibourne's baking step, which produces a lovely crust. I always reverted back to his. 

And then I lost track of the idea. I joined a CSA and started sauteing kale or eating it raw.  My potatoes wound up in Spanish tortillas. I moved for a while to an apartment with an iffy oven. I forgot about colcannon. For almost 20 years.

But earlier tonight, facing a big bunch of collard-like "winter greens" I'd found at the farmers' market last weekend and wanting comfort food after five days of a nasty cold, I remembered the recipe. I didn't have the cookbook anymore, but Google Books turned up the page exactly as I remembered it, minus a few stains.

I used what I had on hand: a mix of sweet and white potatoes, the unidentified greens, potato water instead of milk, extra onions because they're yummy, and, fittingly, Kerrygold Irish butter. I microwaved the greens instead of boiling them, but other than that, I followed the recipe.

It was as amazingly gratifying and yummy as I remembered it. The only change I'd make: if I were re-writing the recipe, I might mention that under certain circumstances, it serves just one. 

 

Presents Tense

A long-standing tension in our household is that I believe we should spend about $50 apiece on Christmas presents for each other, buying and making maybe one or two things, and then additionally making a donation somewhere in the other person's name. Tony, on the other hand, believes "we each must have at least ten store-bought presents under the tree on Christmas morning, including the dog; no price limits!"

Nevermind that I am Jewish, had never once celebrated Christmas until we got together seven years ago and can't remember whether Christmas morning is December 23, 24, 25 or 26. There! Must! Be! Presents! 

To be fair, Tony really does love giving and getting a lot of presents, and he's very cute in his pajamas, sitting under a dead tree in a sea of withered wrapping paper that I've been re-using since college. And so, by the time we were four years in, we'd had a series of much-anticipated, terribly expensive and totally pleasant gift exchanges. But the best present we could remember--very nearly the only present we could remember--was a rope toy the size of Tony's head that Eggs really loved. It shed little bits of red and navy blue thread throughout our house until we moved in 2010. 

Thus, two years ago,  as a mechanism for fostering creativity and thoughtfulness (not to mention prudence), we imposed a spending cap. I don't remember the amount, and it's not important. Point is: on Christmas morning, it was revealed that we'd both stopped keeping track of how much we'd spent after having blown through the putative limit halfway through buying a houseload of utterly forgettable stuff. It's a miracle neither of us has been elected to the U.S. Senate yet. 

So last year, we took another tack...and it worked beautifully. I don't remember how we came up with the idea, but here's the deal: we created five categories, and we both had to buy the other person a present in each category, plus one present for the dog. This system provided just enough stuff to make Tony happy and just enough constraint to please me, too. 

Our categories were:

* Something to read
* Something to wear
* Something to do
* Something for the apartment
* Something romantic

If you approach things creatively,  it's not hard to wind up with ten presents each. Mittens, for instance, can be wrapped separately. And we have two apts, so that category is extensible (lest you picture extravagance, they are both small rentals--one with no heat, the other where we discovered that Eggs does not chase mice).

This year, we might consider other categories. For example:

* Something philanthropic
* Something home-made
* Something used
* Something electronic
* Something serial
* Something to listen to
* Something to watch
* Something to eat 
* Something to build
* Something to grow
* Something to play with
* Something that smells great
* Something not from China 

Any good categories we're missing? And any totally fucking indestructible dog toys you'd recommend? If it has stuffing, it does not qualify. 

Looking forward to Christmas morning this year! Whichever day it turns out to be.

Giddyup, Cowboy

 
Great news: the neighborhood couple who fostered Cowboy last week are keeping him. They thought about it really carefully, which you like to see. But he's such a sweetheart, and so trainable, one imagines it wasn't an excrutiating decision.

The silver lining to this already-shiny situation is that I get to be, like, a dog aunt. The couple is away this weekend, so Cowboy is staying with me. And after they get back, he'll spend some weekdays here when they're both going to be out all day. In other words: I'm the big winner here.

Overall, fostering has been an interesting experience. I got to connect with a great dog, I met a bunch of terrific people in the neighborhood, and I got a little smarter about posting this sort of thing online. Would definitely buy again. A++++++++.