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.

Food, Family, Friday: Musing on Millet

Husband screw-ups are a special category of mistake.  No doubt there are infinite variations, but they all have at least two qualities in common: 1) they begin with a sense of triumph quickly dashed (think of the DIY husband who declares the kitchen faucet fixed right before the geyser erupts and a thunderous voice instructs him to build an ark); and 2) they somehow have lasting effects, even if it is just a bit of family folklore Mom enjoys telling (“Kids, remember the time Dad stapled himself to the UPS truck and ended up in Nebraska?”). 

A few months ago, I was walking to the car after a furious bout of grocery shopping.  My phone rang and it was BMW wondering when I’d be home. 

“Just heading to the car,” I said.  “And don’t worry, I got your millet.” 

Yup, that exotic grain she wanted took me a while to find, but a trained hunter like this Chef Dad could stalk his prey in any grocery store.  Her man was up to the challenge.

“My what?” BMW asked.

“Your millet.  The grain you wanted for baking.”

“I wanted bulgur,” she said.  “What’s millet?”

A husband can get whiplash from triumph turning to defeat so quickly.

“How much did you buy?” she asked with an entirely unwarranted alarm in her voice.

“A pound and a half.”

Since this is a family blog I will simply say that she expressed a certain dissatisfaction with that data point.

“I wanted to make sure you had enough,” I protested.

“I didn’t want ANY!”

So, not only did I have to go back inside to buy bulgur, the mistake just keeps on giving.  I have been working for the past several weeks to do things with millet.  It’s gone into soups and stirfries and you should see the fashionable millet and duct tape shoes the kids are wearing.

However, the millet odyssey came to a close recently thanks to inspiration from this millet risotto recipe on Cookstr. As you can see from the picture, millet is a tiny – almost seed-like – grain that you can use like rice.  You can pretty much substitute it for rice in many recipes, but it will not plump up the way rice will.  It has a nutty consistency when cooked and offers plenty of al dente bite.    

I seldom follow any recipe to the letter, so here I stir fried the zucchini until it had some color and then removed it from the pan.  Then, some butter went into the pan, followed shortly by a whole large onion, chopped.  In the meantime, about three bulbs of garlic were roasting in the oven.

Take a look at this post for a better primer on risotto, but once the onion softens the millet goes in and gets a little stir fry of its own to coat it with the fat and the sugars from the onion and even toast a bit, maybe two minutes.  Throw in a cup of white wine and simmer until it is absorbed.  I had leftover chicken broth from some poached chicken breast (another blog post) and added it a half cup at a time until the millet was cooked.

A bit of half and half to add creaminess.  About three quarters of a cup of parmigiano-reggiano added in roughly thirds.  Last thing you do is add back the zukes and the roasted garlic. 

Once she tasted it, BMW said, “I guess we need millet, huh?”