Easy!

You know how there are those situations that make you revert to your college, elementary-school, or worse, toddler-style self?

Like when we’re home for Thanksgiving, my sister Kate and I squabble over who gets to beat the whipped cream for the Maida Heatter chocolate marquise cake even though the rest of the year we adoringly text each other pictures of our food and trade recipes and tips and menu ideas.

Or like how when Jennie manages the soundtrack for high school friends’ birthdays, we dance to 50 Cent “In Da Club” like it’s, er, going out of style.

Here’s another situation that makes me revert to a younger, more self-conscious Cara: opening up a packed lunch.

I’m a food blogger. My packed lunches taste great. It’s just that sometimes they’re a little weird.

Last week, Alex told me he thinks of Mark Bittman as the food world’s mad scientist, and as soon as he said it, I realized how much I loved the image: Bittman, genius of simple but delicious culinary combinations, mixing and shaking and furiously sautéeing, pausing to consider something deeply for just a moment, and then getting right back to topping pasta with a sauce made of nuts and pairing fresh summer tomatoes with, well, a hot pan.

Today’s recipe–which happens to be vegan and gluten-free because sometimes that’s just how I roll–comes from the pages of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, though it’s been subject to my own version of the mad kitchen scientist role, which I play pretty much daily in my little Prospect Heights kitchen.

Basically, in an epic riff on Bittman’s Pasta with Almond Butter on page 455, I turn a third of a cup of cashews into a creamy, ginger-spiked sauce for pasta. After tossing that with pad thai-sized rice noodles, I follow Mr. B’s approach to searing both tomatoes and scallions, only instead of serving the caramelized, soy sauce-seasoned veggies as a room-temperature salad as he does on page 60, I use them as a topping for my cashew noodles, transforming the mismatched elements into a noodle bowl of love, which is another way of saying that I practice alchemy, as I suppose any mad scientist should.

Do you own any of Mark Bittman’s books (maybe Food Matters?)? And do you find them as inspiring as I do?

Sometimes food inspiration just strikes, and sometimes you have to go searching for it. If you’re going to go searching, there’s no better place to go than San Francisco.

Specifically, Tartine.

Grilled cheese sandwiches are my kryptonite, but goodness I’ve been boring about them lately. Every day, the same. Two slices of whole-grain Bread Alone bread. Some Cabot sharp cheddar. On one forgetful day, I was out of butter and fried my grilled cheese in olive oil. That was the most excitement my sandwiches have seen this summer.

At Tartine, the baked goods beckon, but I needed lunch. I ordered a toasted sandwich, and Alex’s step-sister, Lissa Ivy, ordered one too. I liked hers better, but I’ll get to that.

There are logical reasons on both sides of the fusion equation for why a Banh Mi Hot Dog should taste good. On the Vietnamese side, the fact that a pork hot dog reflects the array of pork products, from pâté to meatballs to slow-cooked pork, traditionally used in a banh mi. On the American side, the fact that a Chicago dog, for one, sports an almost salad-like array of vegetable toppings, some of them pickled tangy sweet, just like a banh mi’s vegetable filling.

In April, we outlawed hummus recipes from Small Kitchen College. I’m enamored of the healthful bean dip, but enough is enough. Our team of crack college writers seemed to eat pints of hummus daily, and to compensate for the repetition, they invented hummus in a million and one forms, from spicy green lentil hummus to hummus served hot. Naturally, college students and twenty somethings looking for healthful, cheap meals and snacks will turn to hummus on the rare occasions we tire of peanut butter. But over there, we had to move on.

Here on Big Girls, Small Kitchen, the hummus embargo does not apply. Lucky me! I make hummus from scratch as often as I can. Still, as much as I adore the classic, rich with tahini and olive oil, I can’t avoid experimenting–just like the collegiate cooks.

Sometimes that experimenting includes such far-fetched, totally un-hummus-y flavors as mint and lime.

This is a vegetarian recipe for a simple side dish. But how little that sentence does to describe the taste of a crisp-tender sugar snap pea that has marinated, after cooking, in a sweet and tangy sauce made from sesame seeds and gotten better the more of the Japanese-inspired flavor it soaks up. This is a vegetarian recipe for a a simple side dish that you will want to make again and again, for a sauce you will want to mop up with rice or bread or whatever carb’s handy, or just pour into your mouth.

Roles have reversed around here. For more than two years, I had a flexible schedule. I worked on the book and the site from home, rode the subway at length for meetings and freelance gigs around town, and always had the ability to make myself a homemade breakfast and lunch, and to cook Alex and me an awesome dinner. And then I decided to throw myself into my writing, to see where being a journalist in realms beyond food could take me, and for the summer, I’ve been working as a reporter. That means I leave home early and get home late. At the same time, a project Alex was on at work that kept him glued to his computer into the wee hours has finally subsided, and he’s finally catching his breath just as I gear up to go.

Sometimes I feel like I’m going to be the last person on the planet still eating white flour. I adore baguettes and good sourdough loaves, De Cecco spaghetti and Mission flour tortillas. While the world explodes in gluten-free-ness and low-carb attitudes, I’ll just keep chomping on the white old-fashioned stuff.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t love the whole varied rainbow of grains. Kamut finds a place in my quickbreads; oats and puffed brown rice in my granola. I eat quinoa at least once a week, and I love a good rice bowl topped with veggies and peanut sauce. There’s cornmeal in polenta and grits. There’s buckwheat soba.

In fact perhaps the final grain frontier on this blog is wild rice. I’ve made it once or twice, I suppose, but never in a way that was worth writing up. And of course it’s not really a grain but a grass, so go figure.

A long time ago I read about rice salad in an issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Their slant was that if you’re making rice for rice salad, you should cook the rice in lots of water, as if you were cooking pasta, rather than steaming it in a little stockpot as usual. The method gives each grain a certain resilience, so it doesn’t stick to the others and has an easier time absorbing dressing and mingling with other ingredients–like these white mushrooms, which I fry quickly over high heat to create something crispy rather than melty.