meatless monday

In seventh grade, during bar mitzvah season at my middle school, my friend Leora and I would stake out a spot near the kitchen and grab each hors d’oeuvres first. We knew early that the passed appetizers are often the best part of the meal. But we had a specific reason for filling up before the meal. For dinner, we’d as likely as not be served the kids’ menu, and we were seriously not interested in chicken fingers or mac ‘n cheese or other totally condescending offerings.

Funny that more than a decade later, I adore kid food. I’ll opt for a Shake Shack burger over a sit-down lunch nine times out of ten. And that’s why I loved Catherine McCord’s first Weelicious book and why today’s lunch recipe, which comes from Catherine’s new hardcover, Weelicious Lunches: Think Outside the Lunch Box with More Than 160 Happier Meals, has a place on a a blog for “big kids,” aka twenty-somethings.

Catherine understands the classics. I mean this is a recipe artist who can take a peanut butter and jelly and make it the best sandwich ever, tweak a pizza so it’s simultaneously fun and nourishing, and turn a normally monster-sized burrito into the ideal size for a child’s lunch-or the lunch of someone like me who struggles with the midday meal and is always trying to perfect it. The way I think about it, comforting kid food is the spoonful of honey that makes eating healthful and sustaining foods easier and more fun. Packing a crave-worthy lunch takes the drudgery out of the brown bag.

In Weelicious Lunches, the burrito is a really simple wrap, a bundle of refried beans and gooey cheese easily assembled at home and microwaved at work until melty. I added a quick Brussels sprout hash made from slivered sprout leaves seasoned lightly with some chipotle chili powder and cooked until just tender.

I’m always curious about what other people eat. When I meet the all-too-common New Yorker who says “I don’t cook,” I always ask what he does for meals, out of a genuine (if naive) curiosity (because I know all the reasons that cooking can be a pain when life is busy). When I meet people who do cook, I plaster them with questions too. Do they cook every night? On Sundays for the week? How do they deal with grocery shopping and planning? Maybe this is market research, but mostly I’m just annoyingly inquisitive.

(If you’re a New Yorker who doesn’t cook but wants to, you probably need a coach.)

My questions have often led me to new insights about what you guys, my audience, want. I’ve also received recommendations for recipes I never would have thought of. Like when a friend pulled her copy of Plenty from the bookshelf one afternoon when we were over and turned it to Ottolenghi’s recipe for roasted vegetables with vinaigrette, and I had my own moment of cooking confusion. “What do you serve them with?” I asked. Maybe some quinoa, she replied, but maybe not. Wondering if roasted vegetables alone could comprise dinner, I went home and made the recipe for Alex and me. We did pile our veggies on top of quinoa, but it turned out we didn’t have to. These vegetables pack both flavor and substance, and they’re really tasty.

The real epiphany in this recipe is dressing roasted vegetables after they come out of the oven. You may question dressing something that already has been tossed with olive oil, but the way the vinaigrette soaks into the hot fennel, onions, sweet potatoes, and carrots will make you forget your questions. That addition of flavor (and calories) is also what bumps this up from some side dish to the status of a vegetarian main.

I rode across the Manhattan Bridge four times on Saturday. I’ve always confined my biking to Brooklyn, its less-trafficked bike lanes and provincial Prospect Park loop; in Manhattan, I’d usually rather be a straphanger or a pedestrian-but four years into riding here, I’m fully obsessed with my bike to the point where I can confront my fears of big city trucks and taxis and bike traffic. Also, my two Saturday missions were on the Lower East Side, a short sprint from where the Manhattan Bridge spits us two-wheelers out on Canal.

I’m now assured that riding across the Manhattan Bridge counts as a quintessential New York City experience as much as the walk across the the far more touristy (and prettier) Brooklyn Bridge. If you’ve ever sat on the Q train at sunset, you’ll know about the view. Biking brings an extra feeling of floatiness to “one of the greatest cheap visual feasts in America,” as well as the thigh burn that results from the slow climb, which makes you feel as though you’ve earned the view, and then Manhattan.

On Sunday, after all that exertion, I was hungry, even after brunch. I’ve heard this happens, that when you exercise a bunch you crave healthful meals, rather than any old junky calories, and really nourishing food did come out of my kitchen this weekend.

My Middle Eastern flavor journey fit in perfectly with these cravings. The food of Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Iran contains richness from olive oil and nuts and rib-sticking bulk in the form of healthy lentils. I’ve already mentioned red lentils in my post about Smoky Red Lentil Burgers, and last night, we had Claudia Roden‘s Creamy Red Lentil Soup, no matter that it’s August. (Fall is coming.) The creaminess derives from the silky sautéed onions and the red lentils, which are cooked about thirty minutes past the point when you could technically eat them, until they’ve burst and disintegrated and begun to act as though they’ve been treated with an immersion blender. The non-necessity of the blender makes this incredibly easy to make.

The pita croutons are my cheesy addition. They deliver the cheesy crunch that even the best-ever soups tend to need.

The pinnacle of summer arrives when you can make dinner from the farmers’ market. I don’t mean dinner’s side dish or the base of your peach crisp. I mean dinner from start to finish.

You need two criteria met: a well-equipped farmstand, the kind that sells local bread and some cheese; and the arrival of heirloom tomato season. I say this because no summer meal is worth its salt unless it includes at least one variety of local heirloom tomato.

Even though we’ve passed summer’s midway point, we’re still at the beginning of peak tomato time. I haven’t seen a ton of Brandywines or Cherokee Purples yet, despite rummaging through the boxes at my favorite farmstand as early as I can get out of bed on weekend mornings.

Instead, when I put together this recipe to highlight heirloom tomatoes as part of Whole Foods’ campaign to shout about tomatoes from the rooftops, I opted for Sun Golds, little yellow-slash-orange globes of sweetness. They’re sweet and a little tangy, and they pair beautifully with cheese-in sandwiches or on pizza-but I wanted a more farmstand-y meal than just pizza.

So, I grabbed a few stout gray zucchini from the stand, halved them, and scooped them out to turn them into little boats, also known as summertime pizza crusts. That’s when, looking at the rest of my market yield, fresh onions and garlic and mozzarella, I decided to throw together a margarita pizza-inspired filling headlined by my Sun Golds. Inside these “boats,” you’ll find those sweet baked tomatoes, flavorful breadcrumbs, sweet summer onion, basil, and more.

Whole Foods has tremendous rescources for enjoying your tomatoes, as well as tons of fabulous tomato recipes. My favorite is this Heirloom Tomato BLT!

I wrote this sponsored post in partnership with Whole Foods to make sure you guys didn’t miss the glory and deliciousness of heirloom tomatoes. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that help inspire BGSK’s content!

We spent the weekend out of the city, at our friends’ Kate and Sam’s place in the Hudson Valley. We crunched on cicadas as we walked, played poolside backgammon, and feasted on the Montreal bagels Kate and Sam store in their freezer. (If you haven’t had one, they’re sweeter and smaller than New York City bagels, and they had some converts among the group.) On Sunday, we went to the Rhinebeck farmers’ market to see what produce the Hudson Valley had to offer.

Cicadas aside, the Hudson Valley is hardly a far-flung place. The climate is more or less the same as here and the produce grows at roughly the same pace. Still, I love branching out beyond the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market to see what other markets’ stalls have to offer. The Rhinebeck one has cinnamon rolls and baguettes from the Tivoli Baking Company, piles of cherries, a falafel stand, and a beautiful organic vegetable stall that sold quart boxes of these adorable, sweet Pattypan squash, which I bought to bring home for Sunday dinner. It’s an off week for our CSA, so we had room in the fridge.

Since embarking on my goal to discover and devour Middle Eastern food, sponsored by Sargento, I’ve noticed a certain similarity between the way I like to eat in the summer and the way that Middle Eastern cuisine would have me eat all the time.

The night I learned to make cous cous from scratch, I fell in love with a carrot salad. The grains of fluffy, fresh cous cous were the best cous cous I’d ever had, but the carrot salad that the team from NY Shuk served us alongside the slow-roasted lamb shoulder stole the show for me.

I have been a fan of glazed carrot coins since day one of my life. Carrots grow tender and sweet when lightly steamed. This Middle Eastern carrot recipe seasons those tender carrots with herbs, oil, spices, and a little bit of lemon, fragrant and addictive seasonings that suit the vegetable perfectly. As addictive as glazed carrots, this salad is ten times more sophisticated than that childhood favorite.

You guys, I solved lunch.

I recently wrote about my occasional breakfast ruts. Truth is, I’ve been in a lunch rut for my entire life.

I hate lunch, always have. While I know I should choose something light and low on carbs in order to minimize the post-lunch stupor I experience, it’s much more fun, when you’re craving a burger or are invited out to the Indian buffet, to partake in a meal as hearty as dinner. I know some folks who skip lunch altogether, but my growling stomach makes it impossible for me to accomplish that. So I end up paralyzed and indecisive, a little bit hungry or way too full.

This kale salad solves lunch by creating a killer balance of rich ingredients with nutrient-rich greens. The egg, walnut, and avocado collaborate to deliver satisfaction. The kale is their foil, bringing each bite to your mouth without the help of a piece of bread, my original delivery method. Plus, kale beats out lettuce as a base for a brown bag salad: you can dress the greens with a honey-tinged vinaigrette in the morning, and they soften up by the time you dig in at lunch, as opposed to getting soggy like lettuce.