I Get By With (No Salt and) A Little Help From My Friends

What are our friends for, if not to push us out of our comfort zone? My good buddy Jess aka Sodium Girl was kind enough to do that when she looped me into her Sodium Free Recipe Rally of 2012.

For full disclosure, salt and I have a very loving relationship. My favorite candy is salty black licorice. I'm the daughter of a man who used to get caught with his little hand in the pickle barrel at the grocery store, and the sister of a man who traipsed around Turkey with jars of pickled vegetables tied in plastic bags to the outside of his backpack. Because I'm not in the habit of eating processed foods, I feel comfortable salting the food I make at home without hesitation; I channel chef friends when I cook, hovering my hand above a dish and liberally showering it with a salty downpour.

So when Jess challenged me to cook a meal salt-free, one that I otherwise would salt, I went for a recipe from the weeknight meal arsenal, enough part of my routine that I'd theoretically miss the salt if it didn't come to the table. I chose my sister Dana's Winter Lentil Soup.

The key is using power house spices (here it's cumin and curry) until you forget the salt. Oh yeah, and that little gift to man called chili pepper flakes. I'm obsessed with all things chili these days (cue the plane tickets to Korea burning a whole in my drawer until May)! Those flavors plus a certain salinity I swear I taste in the collard greens (is this possible? is this allowed?) made my sister's recipe proud, no salt needed.

Dana's Winter Lentil Soup

1. Saute 1 diced yellow onion in olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat.
2. After a couple minutes, add 2-3 diced celery ribs and 2-3 diced carrots.
3. Once the mirepoix is soft, add about 4-5 cloves diced garlic, give a quick stir, then add 1.5-2 quarts of any salt-free broth you choose (Jess's favorite is mushroom stock; I've made tasty fava stocks using the empty pods).
4. Add 1 lb rutabaga or turnips, peeled and cut into half-inch cubes, and 3/4 cup lentils (I like French green lentils--their small shape makes them chewy, and the range of colors is so pretty).
5. Bring to a boil and then right away reduce heat to low. Simmer for about 30 minutes.
6. Add cumin, curry powder, and red chili pepper flakes to taste.
7. When the lentils are about 5 minutes away from chewy-soft and ready to eat, add in a head of collards or kale (for either, cut away the stems first--I recommend gnawing on them while you cook--and tear up the leaves roughly before throwing them in the pot).
8. Stir a couple more minutes, do one more taste check for spice level, and ladle into bowls.
9. I recommend topping with toasted walnuts for a nice nuttiness and crunch, but that's because I recommend topping EVERYTHING with toasted walnuts!

Mrs. Kim's Bangin Kimchee

Ingredients:

-6 small or 4 large Napa cabbages, salted overnight with coarse rock salt (make a salt and water solution, immerse cabbage heads, remove, rub salt on leaves of each head, leave in fridge overnight, next morning take out, rinse and let sit to drain and dry)
-2 daikon radishes: peel, then grate one of them into long thin strips using a carrot peeler (save the liquid). The other dice into 1-inch chunks
-1/3 c garlic, pounded with a mortar and pestle
-1 bunch chives (long, wide asian ones)
-2 bunches green onions
-rice flour
-korean dried chili flakes (mama Kim wants Suz to keep hers in the freezer so it stays fresh)
-8 oz frozen or fresh oysters (with their juices)
-1/2 c fermented anchovy juice (other asian fish sauce will do)
-1/3 c salted baby shrimp (mrs. Kim sent Susan ours in a maxwell house coffee jar)

Directions:
-add rice flour to 3 cups water until you have a loose batter; add the radish liquid, fish sauce, and dehydrated shrimp.
-add the chili flakes to the batter until it becomes a thick paste
-add the shredded daikon, garlic, chives (cut into 2" long pieces) & scallions (cut into 1" long pieces), and half the oysters with all their juice
-don your rubber gloves, and rub each head of cabbage with the paste--cover the front and back of each leaf and then use your hand to close each head tightly, then submerge it leaf side down into the jar. -Stuff each jar with as many cabbage heads as will fit, maybe mixing in a few covered daikon pieces to fill the empty spots.
-Continue until all of your cabbage is in jars, but make sure you leave a few leaves out of the jars
-leave outside for a day or two, on a tray that you don't mind getting dirty if a jar leaks or explodes. Then transfer to your fridge and taste, eat and enjoy over the coming weeks!

Prep Notes:

Don't forget the house special: tasting the raw kimchee treat! Wrap a leaf covered in chili paste around an oyster and plop it into your mouth. I couldn't believe how good this was, the oyster unbelievably creamy (granted we shucked our own fresh hog island oysters) against the hot, crunchy kimchee leaf. Not something you get to taste every day.

The whole process was a feast for the senses--even the sliced green onions waiting to be rolled into the dough for scallion pancakes filled the air with their nutty, woody scent. Mrs. Kim's anchovy sauce, meanwhile, smelled of cat food.

The first saucey cabbage looked like a bloody dying bird lying at the bottom of the big jar. The room started to smell like cabbage as we went through the process of opening up each head to stuff it with red paste from every angle. If you're wondering about the sound of kimchee, it's a gurgle--oozing and bubbling of wet leaves being stuffed into glass jars.

Sasha said a kimchee prayer ("thank you, cabbage, for letting us stuff oysters and chili into you"). We also decided that kimchee is perfect for koreans: as Sasha and Andrew said, it's patient and improves over time. Or as Sus put it, they're both messy, fiery and stinky.

Now all I have to do is wait a few weeks for my kimchee to get funky, then get myself in a room with someone who can teach me how to make a pork belly and soft tofu kimchee stew!

The most delicious day of the summer

Sometimes the stars align right, and today that was to give me the most delicious day in my adult memory.

Right now I'm sitting with a glistening dressed bowl of greens from Little City Gardens, thanks to the lovely Rosita belonging to their wonderful CSA program. Little violet and yellow blossoms, fronds of purslane (more on that later), thin and fierce arugula and the usual carrot/radish/avo thrown in with shredded parm and hand-smooshed sungold tomatoes.

The day started with a delicious meet and greet with Geets at the top of dolores park. The air, the whole day in front of us, was tasty.

Then on to Wise Sons Deli, my first time to visit. I felt like a pro. It was pretty empty, what I took as a reward for being there by 10....turns out we were the suckers who missed our chance for a reuben due to being there before 11. No charming of chef Leo could change our fate, so we sated ourselves on a combo of the rest:
-smoked trout salad sandwich on rye. This was like clouds of pink fishy magic on the softest, moistest rye you've ever had, with a great cornmeal crust
-the sons' pickle plate: overcoming all odds due to my current state of SF pickle fatigue, this plate wowed me between the pickled purslane (my new favorite veggie), pickled spring onions, and pickled cukes which tasted decidedly different from the pickled cukes served with the sandwiches
-chopped liver plate: so satisfying spreading the sweet/salty/funky paste on slices of fresh rye

They sampled their chocolate babka throughout our visit, and despite a bit of confusion around the service format (for some reason our group was slow on the uptake that it's an order-at-the-front-and-set-your-own-table kind of place), I ate it up. Must have been the combination of nostalgic warm and fuzzy feeling from eating the food my jewish ancestors ate in nyc with inspiration watching two guys my own age pull off such a delicious spread.

From there it was on to kimchee making, about which i'll write about separately because it's a story unto itself; fast forward through an amusing burning man shopping trip in valencia's vintage stores and it was time to think towards dinner.

What was so satisfying about my dinner choice is that it was the third thing I crossed off my list of things I'd wanted to do for months. Along with learning to make kimchee and trying wise sons deli pop up, I've been wanting to grill sardines ever since we got a backyard grill.

I had fun gutting the sardines, vacillating between feeling conviction about my recent vegetarian tendencies as I cringed at sacs of burgundy guts trickling out of the middle of each fish, and feeling proud about getting my hand dirty. The grill was easy enough for this laywoman to figure out, so after a brush of the cilantro chutney I'd made from other Little City Farms CSA box treasures, I laid em on there. A few minutes on each side and my dinner was made!

I'm not sure whether most people put as many of the whole sardines with bones still in right into their mouth, but I think chewing through a few featherweight bones puts a little hair on the old chest. Thus with a different version of satisfying fishy moisture, I closed my delicious day!