Food, Family, Friday: Edamame and Whole Grains

I really wanted to title this post “The Courtship of Eddie’s Mommy.”  But, I wimped out and went for the title that would be more useful for search engines.

“The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” was a late 1960s TV show starring Bill Bixby as a hip and happening widower with an inquisitive young son named Eddie.  The core of the show involved sweet, insightful heart to heart discussions between a father and son bonding in a changing world.  Presumably, it has never been remade because no one can figure out how to turn that into a Charlie Sheen sitcom. 

The show lasted several seasons until one day on the set Bill Bixby turned into The Incredible Hulk and threw young Eddie into the ocean prompting Iron Man to buy the studio and shut down production.

OK, so that’s not quite what happened, but it would be one way to update the show, am I right?

And let's be clear to note that while these videos have been on Youtube for some time, they are no doubt copyrighted by fine upstanding organizations who recognize the value of keeping something they have already paid for in circulation.

However, this post is about Eddie’s Mommy, or edamame if you prefer but no one in this house can ever say it that way.  Seems there is a penchant for cheap jokes around here and I can’t imagine where it comes from.

The existence of edamame is one of God’s reminders that there is no excuse for not eating healthy.  They are shucked soybeans that are cheap, highly nutritious, tasty, go into anything and come in a bag that will shove open the freezer door and leap across the kitchen into the microwave without any human intervention.  People, it doesn’t get any easier.

This recipe also uses my super duper Asian Sunbutter Sauce.  Sunbutter is made from crushed sunflower seed kernels and offers more flavor than peanut butter, which we don’t use around here because of a peanut allergy in the family.  Let's give a shout out to Red River Commodities and SunGold Foods for producing a great product.

Like most quick sauces, the proportions can be varied for taste preferences or desired effect.  Here, I make it a little looser, with less sunbutter and more soy sauce, than I do in other applications.

Edamame and Whole Grains

1 16 oz. bag frozen edamame, cooked as bag instructs (obey your bag!)

~ 3 cups whole grains, cooked (we used brown rice, wild rice and millet - yes, millet!)

~ 1 pound mushrooms, chopped

2 medium zucchini, chopped (I chopped them into matchsticks to vary textures)

1 medium yellow squash, chopped (I did a yellow one just for color, add another zucchini if yellow isn’t your thing)

½ a large onion, chopped

Asian Sunbutter Sauce

~ 1/3 cup of good soy sauce (if acid is listed as an ingredient, buy a different one)

2-3 splashes of apple cider vinegar

1 splash of rice wine vinegar

couple squirts of honey

1 heaping tbsp. of sunbutter

Couple cloves of garlic, minced

~ a man's thumbnail sized chunk of ginger, minced

For this dish, you should end up with about ¾ cup of total sauce volume.  Feel free to play around with the proportions of the sauce.  Don’t skimp on the apple cider vinegar though.

Put your cooked grains into a serving bowl big enough to toss together all ingredients.

Stir fry the mushrooms in batches and put them in with the grains.  Do the same with the onions, zucchini and yellow squash mixing some of each per batch.

Carefully open the edamame bag as there will be steam.  Drain them first in case there is too much liquid in the bag.  Add them with everything else.

You should have a heaping dish at this point.  Toss things together a bit.  Then add your sauce in stages.  Mix further after each addition of sauce.  The whole dish should end up a bit moist, but you don’t want it wet.

Serve and have a heart to heart discussion around the table about The Incredible Hulk.

The Mushroom: A Kindred Spirit

I give you the mushroom.  A delectable fungus, bursting with glutamate-powered flavor, it adds an earthy, muscular, comfort-food component to anything it touches.

As you probably know, the mushroom spends a great deal of time in the dark.  For some strains, darkness is mandatory and the most expensive mushrooms in the world can only be found by specially-trained dogs and pigs who dig the mushrooms out of the earth they spend their lives buried within.  Such mushrooms are clueless about the world at large, having never even glimpsed it in all its complexity.  Yet, by virtue of their fungal nature, they nonetheless have a strange social connection to other living things.

Muscular, usually dirty, in the dark and clueless.  Remind you of any members of our own species?

“Hey, when is that big show your daughter is in?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the wife.”

I’m sure cavemen had perfectly good reasons for getting married.  For the modern man, one of the primary reasons is social survival in a complicated world. The complexity of contemporary family life is simply not a thing that can be clubbed into submission, thus limiting the usefulness of the skills evolution provided us.  In other words, husbands and fathers spend a lot of time in the dark despite apparent social connections.  Not that there is anything wrong with that…

“Is your son signed up for the soccer season?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the wife.”

Males can bring home the bacon, and the more enlightened of us can fry it up in a pan.  But, knowing who needs to be where at what time wearing what shoes and carrying which equipment is beyond the number of moving parts the male evolved to handle.   We are social mushrooms, naturally connected to other things yet, well, in the dark.

So, when a father is asked a factual question about the comings and goings of the family, the answer “I do not know” is a true answer if verity exists at all in this world.  It is a statement of the knowledge that a fact exists in the space-time continuum while expressing true wonder at what form that fact might actually take at any given moment.

“What are you guys doing this weekend?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the wife.” 

This answer, when spoken by husbands and fathers, should not be interpreted as “Nothing, what did you have in mind?”  A better, more accurate, far more useful interpretation is: “Talk to the wife.  I’m just the husband and father.”  It is not that the thing in question is not knowable.  Just that someone else knows it.

Now, in fairness to all the ladies out there, I must admit my own wife’s suspicion that this ignorance is not evolutionary, but a willful strategy to dodge the responsibility of maintaining life in a crazy world. 

“How can you know when the Texas Longhorns football season starts and be clueless about dance classes and piano lessons?”

“Um, I do not know.  Ask the – Wait a minute.  This is a trick, right?  Opening day is September 4, but kickoff time is 2:30 Central.”

So, I wish to express an affinity between all the Chef Dads out there and the lowly mushroom.  Organisms that are organically connected to other things, yet spend a great deal of time in the dark.

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

Ingredients:

A bit of butter

~ 1 pound white mushrooms

~ ½ pound shitake mushrooms, stemmed

½ a large onion, diced

A few cloves garlic, chopped

Fresh herbs (here I used rosemary, thyme, parsley, oregano)

3/4 cup or so chicken stock

½ cup or so half and half

~ ¾ pound bulky pasta (here I used farfalle)

Sautee the white mushrooms with a pinch of salt in the butter with just a splash of olive oil over it.  I usually put all the mushrooms in the pan together, though some no doubt would scoff that they are likely to stew before they brown.  True to one degree or another, but as long as you’re browning them afterward and you pay attention to them, I don’t worry about that.  

When the mushrooms start taking on color, add the onions.  Sautee everything until the onions are translucent.  Add the garlic.   Cook further until you get hit in the face with a good whiff of garlic from the pan. 

Add the stock and stir.  Let that cook down, reducing maybe in half.  Add the shitakes somewhere in here.  Putting the more flavorful mushrooms in at this later point allows them to give up their juices right into the sauce and flavor the whole dish. 

Cook until your shitakes wilt, but you still want it all to be a bit loose and saucy, then add the herbs and adjust seasoning.  Finish with the cream and allow that to reduce a bit until it is saucy.  Don’t be afraid to add a little more half and half if you need to.  BTW, once you put that half and half into your pot, watch it like a hawk so it does not boil over and dump all that fat onto the flame under the pan.

Toss with the pasta and serve with fresh grated parmesan.

And if you want to know how good it all was…ask the wife!