Category: dinner

The Renewal: Wild Salmon With Bok Choy, Snap Peas, Fennel, And Crispy Mushrooms

Salmon with bok choy, snap peas, fennel, and crispy mushrooms to greet the new moon.

2020 was the year we all became experts on how far a sneeze can travel in a grocery store.

It was also the year I learned that you cannot erase all of your “recents” documents without actually erasing the document completely from everywhere on your computer, and that because MacBook Pro’s default setting is to encrypt every document you produce, it is nearly impossible to recover anything once you have erased your entire desktop.

Sigh. Par for the course in 2020. Another continuation in a long line of personal losses – of people, of things, of writing.

But. There are still things to be done. Earlier this year I began doing some recipe development for my friend Martha of Full Moon Acupuncture for her School of Renewal.

This Renewal is not a detox or a cleanse. It is not intended to make you feel deprived or hollowed out. It is a chance to re-evaluate what it means to feel truly nourished in all ways – through food, practice, and creativity.

The Renewal begins this Thursday on the New Moon, an excellent time to turn in and reset, to begin something new and set intentions. There is time to sign up still – Martha is offering both self-paced and guided options – and I can tell you that this course (and the person offering it) is something special.

This recipe is one of a couple dozen I developed, the first one, as a matter of fact, and when I put it down in front of KWeeks his comment was, “This is part of a cleanse?!” It is rich and decadent and so very delicious but also good for you and soul-satisfying.

Salmon with Bok Choy, Snap Peas, and Fennel (and Crispy Roasted Mushrooms)
(serves 4)

This decadent dish takes a little time and so works best when you are able to slow down and savor not only the final meal but also the process of making it. Packed with nutrient-dense salmon and vegetables, the Five Tastes, from sweet to sour and a crucial part of the traditional Chinese medicine school of nutritional support, are well represented here.

Ingredients

1 teaspoon coriander seed
3 tablespoons ghee OR olive oil
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 garlic clove minced (about 1 teaspoon)
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
8 ounces snap peas
1 pound bok choy, washed and cut into 2” pieces
1 fennel bulb, top cut off and bulb cut into ¼” pieces (see Recipe Notes)
4 skin-on wild salmon filets, or one two-pound whole filet (see Recipe Notes)
Olive oil (for salmon)
Salt and pepper (for salmon)
Lemon wedges (for serving)
Crispy Roasted Mushrooms (optional, see recipe below)

Method

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line one large baking sheet with parchment paper (you can use lightly greased aluminum foil if you prefer) and another large sheet if you are roasting the mushrooms. Set aside.

Heat a dry sauté pan and add coriander. Swirl coriander in the pan until it becomes fragrant, just a minute or two. This is not required but brings more flavor out of your spices.

In a small bowl, combine coriander, ghee/olive oil, ginger, garlic, apple cider vinegar, salt, and pepper. Mix and set aside.

Place snap peas, bok choy, and fennel in a large mixing bowl and pour the coriander dressing over them. Stir vegetables to coat (you can use your hands). Taste to check for salt and pepper.

Pour vegetables onto baking sheet, saving space for your salmon. It is ok if the vegetables are on top of each other. Slide into preheated oven and set the timer for 10 minutes.

At 10 minutes, it’s time to put the salmon in the oven.

If you are brining your salmon, pat dry and place on baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Give your veggies a stir, then place salmon on baking sheet to cook, skin side down. Total cooking time is around 20 to 25 minutes (20 minutes for veg, and ten or so minutes for salmon).

When the fish is cooked the way you like it, remove the sheet from oven.

Serve with lemon wedges and top with Crispy Roasted Mushrooms.

Recipe Notes

• To prepare fennel, cut the tops off and freeze for vegetable stock. Cut the bulb in half from top to bottom and remove the core (it’s tough and not tasty). Place the flat side on your cutting board and cut into ¼” pieces.
• A few notes on salmon. Wild salmon in season is always more economical than out of season. The most affordable kind of salmon, with less fat and a milder flavor, is keta. Coho, sockeye, Copper River, and King salmon are intensely flavorful fish but can be quite expensive. Most are available frozen year-round.
• Salmon releases albumin when cooked. This harmless protein can be unappetizing to look at. If you would like to minimize this in your fish, brine salmon for 10 minutes before cooking in a solution of 1 tablespoon of salt per cup of water. When ready to cook, pat salmon dry and proceed to cook as directed.

Crispy Roasted Mushrooms

These are easy and delicious, good for snacking and adding texture and umami to food. They can also be added to salads and lunch wraps; the recipe easily doubles.

Ingredients

One pound assorted mushrooms, sliced (shitake, oyster, cremini, etc)
2 teaspoons dried marjoram
½ cup olive oil
Salt, to taste

Method

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl, toss mushrooms, marjoram, and olive oil until thoroughly mixed.

Pour onto baking sheet, making sure the mushrooms have plenty of room.

Roast for around 15 to 20 minutes until crispy.

Remove from oven and sprinkle with salt to taste.

2019: The Year of The Pig, Or How The Chinese Zodiac Is Conspiring Against Me

It me.

So I haven’t written all month in this space, and only once last month, and the last time that happened I decided to call it a “break” and then come back on a semi-regular schedule of two blogs with recipes every month.

This “break” doesn’t feel like that one. I am not sure what’s happening, but it seems easiest to blame it on the upcoming Year of the Pig, my year (I am a metal Pig), which says that this year is going to be not so rosy for Pigs in general. Not Year of the Snake devastating (2013) – just generally not the best.

Proof of impending doom: this new WordPress update which has made hyperlinking text nearly impossible for me to decode. Technology is THE WORST.

But I digress.

I am not sure what direction I am heading vis-a-vis this little old life of mine. I finished a novel of dubious quality in November and attended a writing retreat at Cacapon State Park in December (my first, and a revelation on a number of different levels). Both of these events, in conjunction with a slight tapering off of my (paid) mercenary writing work, have conspired to make me more interested in spending more time considering my own creative life. Not necessarily fiction, but something of my own, whether it’s writing or painting.

For over a year now there has been a bubbling of some idea in the background of my brain, and I can’t quite place my finger on it. I spend a lot of time sitting around, thinking, but I also spend a lot of time, sitting around on social media, and I think that has really dulled my brainpan’s ability to pick up on the finer ideas that are floating around. There is a pattern to my social media usage (it increases when I am feeling disconnected, which increases my feeling of disconnection, ironically, and if I was a person who ate their feelings I would have ballooned to epic proportions in the last six months, but thankfully I am not, as menopause approacheth, I think, and I cannot handle having the Menopausal Muffin Top at the same time I am trying figure out some shit regarding What It All Means and Why Am I Even Here).

Again, digression. But if you are staring down the barrel of 48 years of age (March 14th, if you’d like to order something early. I prefer travel, domestic is fine, and it needn’t be first class. Thanks.), these are some of the things you might be worrying about, too:

  1. How you spend your days when you can spend them (mostly and within reason) in any manner you would choose.
  2. What you might want to create.
  3. Why you might continue to bother creating even though one day feels much like the next and you are continually reminded by your culture that you are, for all intents and purposes, mostly already dead anyway (Helen Mirren is the exception, not the rule).
  4. What on earth you create in the kitchen in the first place when you are now essentially living alone, since your particular friend has moved out (but is still your lovin’ spoonful) and you have no one to cook for anymore, really, even as you had very few people to cook for in the first place. This sounds exceptionally pitiful, but I look at this as a creative issue more than a personal one. Today. Today that’s how I look at it.

And then today I went to yoga – always a good idea – and my lovely teacher Martha read this poem.

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

What is it about yoga teachers sometimes? This was a perfect reminder, in poetry, that the thing that matters is understanding the long, lovely length of you before anything else.

A powerful and potent reminder on a day when, other than yoga, the only thing I have done is endlessly troll the aforementioned social media while eating a surfeit of cinnamon buns and bacon.

But it’s not enough to just know on the inside something. My current dilemma is what to do with the outside.

I was about to push “publish” on this, and I am sure this blog would have been okay. But as it stood, prior to these next few sentences, it is disingenuous and not unlike all of the other “Oh, woe is me, What ever shall I do with all of my free time?” It’s the same white noise of all the other blog posts, only with maybe more run-on sentences and made-up words.

And maybe this post is still like that, to a large extent. I feel like I am struggling with a bonus mid-life crisis (the first one prompted at 42 by a dead husband, for those of you who have not been playing along thus far), except I have no desire for the typical trappings of that – mostly I want to sell my house, bank the cash, and trade the Subaru in for a van that I can live in.

Is this in the realm of possibility? Yes.

Is this the kind of drastic move that I need to make to figure out the burbling idea in the back of my mind, to forever loose the shackles of the unexamined life that I may be leading? Who knows? As all three regular readers of this blog know, it’s not like my life is unexamined. And it’s not like I haven’t had sudden, life-upending change occur already.

The creative conundrum I also find myself in (who to cook for? What to write? Why write? Who cares?) is an added bonus. It makes the struggle to find meaning in the everyday that much more fraught. And godallahbuddha knows I have had plenty of that fraughtness. #MadeUpWord

So it is with not a little humor that I acknowledge my own failing to recognize the long, perfect loveliness of the sow (Pig) that is me and usher in the Year of the Pig (over a month early) with this stuffed pork chop.

Did I answer the question of What The Hell in this blog post? Not really. But it eases this Pig’s mind to practice a little gallows humor as the darkness of this year comes to a close. Plus, this chop is pretty damn good and would make an excellent New Year’s dinner. Cut it in half to make two if you have no one to cook for, and enjoy the little story of its current incarnation.

Stuffed Porkchop With Spinach, Cherries, and Comté

I haven’t ever been pork’s biggest fan. Part of this is due to the fact that I was raised by nearly-Jewish vegetarians, and pork was not part of the regular rotation. Mostly it has to do with preparation. All the pork I ate well into adulthood was thin chops, more bone than meat, fried to within an inch of its life and served without sauce next to an arid bed of rice or other grain.

I drank a lot of water to get those chops down.

That all changed when I met Dorlene Olsen. Dorlene was Dane’s grandmother (the dead husband), an outspoken woman who wasn’t shy about sharing her feelings. The first time I met her, she opened up her door, looked me up and down without even attempting tact and said, “Huh. I thought you were blonde.”

Not an auspicious beginning, and although it was rough going many times with her and me, I always admired the way she cooked. She was the type of cook who didn’t use a recipe, just threw together ingredients and made something delicious. Her food wasn’t fancy, just plentiful and always mouth-watering. The one Thanksgiving I spent with her at the helm was filled with confusion, drunkenness, and one or two joints for the cooks. Dinner didn’t make an appearance until 9:30 p.m., by which time I was faint with hunger and ready for bed, but when it came to the table everyone dug in.

Aside from pecan pie, one of Dorlene’s specialties was the stuffed pork chop. I had never heard of such a thing, but once I tasted it I was sold. Dorlene stuffed hers with homemade bread stuffing, but I have lightened it up just a bit here with tart Northwest cherries in her honor and Comté cheese and spinach that she probably would have disliked on principle.

Spend money for the best chops you can buy; local, pasture-raised, heritage-bred, and organically farmed pork makes all the difference here.

Ingredients

1 cup tart dried cherries
½ cup Comté cheese, diced small
4 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small cubes
10 ounces fresh spinach, washed, thicker stems removed, and roughly chopped
¼ teaspoon salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
4 thick, center cut pork chops with no bone
4 tablespoons butter (for searing)
1 sprig rosemary

Optional Sauce: 1 sprig thyme, 1 finely chopped shallot, ½ cup chicken stock or white wine, 1 tablespoon butter.

Method

Preheat oven to 350⁰. This is where an oven thermometer will come in handy. If your oven is colder, it will take the chops forever to cook.

In a small bowl, combine the cherries, Comte, butter, spinach, salt, and pepper.

With a sharp knife, cut a slit in the pork chops like you are making a little pocket for the stuffing (which is, in fact, exactly what you are doing).

Divide filling evenly among the four pork chops. Season both sides of the chop well with salt and pepper. You should be able to see salt and pepper flecks.

Heat butter and rosemary in a large, oven-proof skillet (cast iron works really well here). When the pan is hot, add the pork chops and sear without moving, about three minutes. Flip and sear the other side, then move skillet to the preheated oven. Cook until the chop reaches an internal temperature of 135⁰, and then move chops to a cutting board to rest for at least five minutes. The carryover heat will cook the chop to a perfect 145⁰.

Should you require a simple sauce, return the skillet to the heat and use a wooden spoon to scrape the bits from the bottom of the pan. Pour off any extra fat (not all of it; some fat is good) and remove the rosemary, then stir in one chopped shallot and a sprig of thyme. Add ½ to one cup of chicken stock or wine and stir as the sauce comes to a boil, reducing the sauce for about five minutes or until it is about half of what you started with.

Remove pan from heat and add a healthy tablespoon of butter. Transfer pork chops to a platter and drizzle sauce over them.


NaNoWriMo: Tamale Pie Saves The Day

Not pictured: two sleeping dogs and a laptop. And a cocktail.

As I begin this blog post, we are getting ready to fall back, and I have not even thought once about writing for this space in November.

I am, instead, writing a novel over these next 30 days, a novel that will most assuredly be a steaming pile of crap but that’s quite against the point. The point is to put the words down, a minimum of 50,000 of them, to let the characters guide the story and really hope for the best.

Take care, and good luck.

Generally, people participating in National Novel Writing Month advise stockpiling snacks and warning loved ones to lower their expectations appropriate to the challenge that lies ahead.

The 50,000 words is not much more than I write for other people for actual cash money but that writing is completely different. Non-fiction writing, even when it’s about laws in Arizona and online professional development, comes easy to me and always has. This month also marks the completion of a huge non-fiction writing job for me: the entirety of the AZ Dentist website.

If there is something wrong with your mouth, chances are very, very good that I can diagnose you. As a party trick, it’s frankly rather obnoxious.

So to celebrate the light pockets that come with finishing a huge job, while nourishing the family during this crazy month of writing (for those keeping track, it’s the 50,000 words on top of the regular 35,000 I have scheduled for November), there is this easy, cheap, filling, and delicious recipe: Tamale Pie.

I never thought I would give out this recipe, but desperate times call for sharing. This is, after all, mid-term elections on top of everything else, so something that fills you up and makes you feel cared for is the best I can do. It’s delicious, warming to the bones, vegan (without the cheese and sour cream), and loved by most everyone who tries it (minus picky teenagers, but they are old enough to heat up their own mac-n-cheese).

It is ironic and curious that so many of the things I love to eat and make for other people are things that I might not have made for myself. This is especially true for when I make dinner.

I make a distinction between making dinner and cooking. Making dinner is that sometimes-crazy activity that gets slotted between after school, athletics, classes, meetings, and bedtimes. It’s why grocery stores have pre-roasted chickens and pre-made mashed potatoes hot and ready. It’s why you can get a bucket of chicken that will serve four people for less than $20. And it’s why pizza places came up with delivery.

In short, making dinner is often frantic, often unhealthy, and sometimes at my house a bag of chips and a tub of guacamole. And maybe some ice cream. These are the types of dinners that most people rely on during National Novel Writing Month.

Cooking, on the other hand, is that lovely, leisurely thing that I do when I have ample time, beautiful ingredients, and no one to please but myself. It’s when I get to experiment with new tools in the kitchen (like my mandolin, which is a lifesaver if I ever had one), when I lazily leaf through cookbooks and cooking magazines to see what strikes my fancy, or when I head up to the market specifically for that day’s meal (so very European).

Making dinner is like feeding baby birds in the nest: everyone with their mouths open, squawking for food, any food, before they start gnawing on and pecking at each other.

Cooking is a light breeze blowing through an open kitchen window, a glass of bourbon by the stove, and Florence + the Machine in the background.

Somehow, some way, Tamale Pie meets somewhere in the middle. It’s easy, but it smells delicious, is like actual cooking without being terribly complicated, and it freezes well. This is a great way to avoid the greasy bucket of chicken and still get dinner on the table in 30 minutes.

Tamale Pie

Feel free to make adjustments to the spice level and seasoning as you wish. Amounts below are mere suggestions.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon chili powder
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 cans beans, rinsed and drained (whatever you have: pinto, kidney, black beans)
1 cup diced tomatoes with juice
1 can of corn, drained (frozen is fine, 2 cups)
1  ¾  polenta (grits work, too – see Recipe Notes)
4 to 6 cups water
¾ teaspoon salt
2 cups Monterey jack cheese, shredded (leave out for vegan version, or use vegan cheese if you are that sort of person)

Method

Preheat oven to 350⁰. Grease and 9″ x 12” glass baking dish (or one of those white Corningware casseroles, the big one) and set aside.

Heat oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add onions and cook until translucent, about five minutes. Add garlic, chili, and cumin and sauté five minutes more.

Add tomatoes, beans, and corn. Season with salt and pepper and let simmer uncovered while you make the crust.

Bring four cups of salted water to a boil in a large saucepan. Whisk polenta in. Cook over medium heat until boiling. Reduce heat to low and cook until thick, stirring constantly, about ten minutes. If your polenta gets thick but is not yet soft and creamy, add more water and continue to cook.

Taste bean mixture for seasoning and flavor before assembling the dish. If it needs more of anything add it now.

Remove polenta from heat. Pour half of the polenta mixture into the glass baking dish, spreading it halfway up the sides of the dish. Pour bean mixture on top, then pour polenta on top of the beans and spread to cover. You will not use all of the polenta (see below)

Top with shredded cheese and bake for 30 minutes. Let sit for at least five minutes before eating. Ten is better.

Recipe notes

  • Any combination of beans is delicious. Use whatever you have on hand.
  • If you don’t have tomatoes, substitute a jar of salsa.
  • Sharp cheddar is also a great topping.
  • Pass the sour cream when serving.
  • If you have leftovers, reheat by adding a little water to whatever you are reheating in and placing the pie on top. The water will lightly steam the polenta as it heats, helping it have a creamier texture the next day.
  • This recipe makes extra polenta, which should be considered a good thing. Reheat the polenta and add some roasted veggies and a fried egg for an award-winning and sanity-saving dinner for two the following night.

Death Of Light: Green Tomatoes, Two Ways

Chow-chow, nearly done.

Things fall apart in the fall. It is the season of death and decay and the gradual fading of the light (fall back on Saturday, November 3rd. Take the country back Tuesday, November 6th).

It is also a time of powerful transformation and intention setting and a season of acceptance that comes after grief in the face of extraordinary change.

This is clearly reflected in nature. Leaves litter the sidewalks and the grass wears a morning tiara of sparkling frost that melts away with the rising sun.

In the garden, overgrown green turns spindly and the last vestiges of fruit struggle to hang on the vine. This is the last call for the summer garden – last call to bring in any kind of harvest before the sun barely crests the horizon and night falls before dinnertime.

Green tomatoes are a unique by-product of the scraggly fall garden. Tart and bright, they are everything you need when the light dims.

Here, two recipes: Green Tomato Chow-Chow and Roasted Green Tomato Soup. The former a staple in the south, the latter a bright ray of sunshine in a darkening fall kitchen. If these don’t do it for you, give last year’s ode to fall a whirl. You can’t go wrong with any of these.

Green Tomato Chow-Chow

Use this uniquely southern condiment on greens, black-eyed peas, pork chops, chicken, BBQ sandwiches, and in salad dressing (or stir it into the soup that follows). Add finely chopped white cabbage if you like. This recipe scales up easily and can be canned for winter time. This particular recipe makes one pint.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups chopped green tomatoes

1 or 2 Thai chilis, diced

1/4 cup diced onion (about 1/4 a large-ish onion)

1/4 cup diced celery (1 stalk, give or take)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon mustard seed

1/8 teaspoon turmeric

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

5 or 6 black peppercorns

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup drained tomato juice

Optional: 1/4 teaspoon fennel and/or coriander seed

Method

Dice the green tomatoes, Thai chili, onion, and celery. Place in a glass bowl and add salt. Stir, then cover with plastic wrap and let sit, at least four hours but preferably overnight.

Place a mesh sieve over a bowl and strain the vegetables, reserving the liquid. Pack vegetables in a pint jar. Measure spices and place on top of the vegetables.

Heat sugar, vinegar, and a 1/4 cup of the reserved tomato liquid in a heavy saucepan until sugar dissolves. Let cool slightly, then pour over vegetables. Let cool to room temperature on the counter, then refrigerate. Only gets better as it sits, but unless you preserve it, eat in a month or less.

Roasted Green Tomato Soup

This soup is quite accidental and made from the bits and bobs of my CSA, herbs grown on my porch, and stock made from vegetable peelings from the summer. This particular batch of stock featured corn cobs and fresh fennel, both delicate, subtle flavors that actually manage to lift the soup to a whole other level. Roasting the tomatoes and caramelizing the onions coax the last bit of summer’s sweetness from both. As with its red brethren, this soup goes well with a buttery, gooey grilled cheese.

Ingredients

2 pounds green tomatoes, cut into quarters for roasting

Olive oil

3 cloves garlic

1 medium onion, diced

1 tablespoon fresh thyme

3 cups vegetable stock

Salt and pepper to taste

2 cups arugula (ish)

Optional garnish: thinly sliced scallions

Method

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss green tomatoes and whole garlic cloves in olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast for 40 minutes.

In a large stockpot, heat another two tablespoons of olive oil. Add onion and cook on medium-low until caramelized (around 30 minutes, so start these when you put the tomatoes in the oven).

Add roasted tomatoes and garlic and stir to combine. Add fresh thyme, salt, and pepper and cook for two minutes. Add stock and arugula. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 to 15 minutes.

Use an immersion blender (or regular blender) to puree the soup until smooth.

 

We Are(n’t) Family: African* Peanut Stew

Formation.

My brother and I have not spoken more than a handful of times since November 8, 2016.

While the final catalyst was his part in the current president’s election, I realized a long time ago that there was a disconnect between us, formed since we could walk. We spent our childhood together, me mostly afraid of him as the object of his ire, scorn, amusement, and anger. Both of our parents worked, and we spent a lot of time alone together. When my brother needed a punching bag I was handy; he routinely delivered punches, smacks, and pinches, along with various projectiles aimed at my head. He broke two windows in our house, one with a walnut and one with a deflated volleyball, as a result of those errant projectiles that veered from me at the last minute and met instead the fragile single panes of our house in the woods.

In terms of missiles, I remember most the Osage oranges, the softball-sized round seed pods that looked like I imagined brains looked. They were all over the base of the hill where our bus turned around. Florida Ropp, our bus driver for my entire elementary career, would pull up to the bottom of the steep hill and let us off before backing into a wide driveway and turning around. I sat in the front so I could fly down the stairs and immediately start running up the hill.

My brother emerged slowly, casually, a few seconds after me, to begin leisurely scanning the ground for the best orange. He would heft several in his hands before finding the perfect missile. My short legs never carried me far enough, fast enough, and the first one nearly always hit me square in the back between my shoulder blades. He had good aim and didn’t often miss.

We don’t agree on politics. We don’t have the same friends, taste in music, or ideas of what is important. Although I think he is a great dad and has a strong work ethic, I am not sure he believes either of those things to be true about me. When I started my own school, I think he envisioned me in a prairie skirt huddled around a kitchen table with a few raggedy unfortunates, not the fully accredited, non-profit private school I actually built.

When my husband died, though, he showed up. He cleaned out the demolished car and returned, silent and somber. He handled Dane’s bill collectors so I did not have to. His whole family piled into their car and drove down to Georgia from Northern Virginia to sit with us, and on that first fatherless Father’s Day in 2013 we spent it at Camden Yards in Baltimore with them.

It is hard for me to rectify what he did in that one time that was so important and vital with the rest of our lives. Even as we don’t speak, I would do the same for his family.

Perhaps we can just come to some peace with each other, where it’s ok that we are related and all, but there is really no obligation. We are guests in each others’ house; our children are strangers to each other. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose who we continue to invite into our lives. It’s hard when the chasm between us is vast and filled with fundamental differences in the way we believe the world should work.

Soup is an odd transition but perhaps just as polarizing. I have never lived with anyone who has liked soup. I do not understand how a person could not like soup. Various reasons have been that it’s sort of a half-meal and not particularly satisfying, or that it’s too, well, soup-y. For this reason, even though I am incredibly good at it (if I do say so myself), I don’t often make soup of any kind.

This recipe was an accident of sorts. Back when I was a public school teacher working with unruly adolescents, I was planning to teach a history unit on Africa and came home one evening – late and hungry – from a team planning meeting. My team decided that I was to design a dish that was quick and easy to share with my class when we started the unit; on that cold and rainy evening, I threw together some traditional flavors from all over Africa and hoped for the best.

After tasting the first batch, I ended up keeping the first to myself and making another for the class. Even the anti-soup faction in the house begrudgingly admitted it was delicious.

These days I make it all for myself and eat the whole batch over several days. It is silky and simple and complicated all at once, and warming all the way down to the bones. I have made my own ras-el-hanout spice blend instead of using the simple ginger/cayenne mixture I first used in this stew (back in 1999). There are various recipes online that include between six and 30 spices in their ras-el-hanout mixes; I chose to go simple for the sake of ease and convenience. The result is a deep, complex, satisfying, and somehow familiar stew that brings everyone back to the table.

African* Peanut Stew

Ingredients

4 tablespoons olive oil
3 cups sweet potatoes or yams, chopped into ½” cubes
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cups vegetable stock (or chicken if not cooking for vegetarians)
2 15-ounce cans of diced tomatoes (or two pints if you preserve your own)
1 large apple, peeled, seeded, and chopped
1 heaping tablespoon ras-el-hanout (recipe below)
Optional but highly recommended: 2 T grated fresh ginger
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (more or less to taste)Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1 cup crunchy peanut butter (unsweetened is best)
1 green pepper, seeded and chopped

Salt and pepper of varying amounts

Ras el Hanout Spice Blend

1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 teaspoon crushed chili flakes
2 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground turmeric

Method

If you are making your own ras-el-hanout, make that first. Add coriander and cumin seeds to a small frying pan over medium heat. Toast until spices begin to open up (they will smell more…toasty…), swirling frequently to avoid burning. If they burn, start over.

Place toasted seeds in a coffee grinder and allow to cool. Add red pepper flakes and grind until fine and incorporated. You can also use a mortar and pestle if you don’t have a spice grinder.

Combine all spices and mix thoroughly. This makes a little over 1/4 cup of ras-el-hanout, which will stay fresh for about a month in a dark, dry place. Realistically, it will be okay longer but just lose flavor the longer you have it.

Make the soup: In a large, heavy-bottomed stewpot (enameled cast iron is great for this), heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onion and sauté for two or three minutes, adding about a teaspoon of salt and some cracked black pepper. Add sweet potatoes and sauté until just cooked, soft on the outside with a slightly firm center (al dente).

Add chopped garlic, stock, tomatoes, apple, ras-el-hanout, fresh ginger (if using), and cayenne pepper. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to a low boil, and then lower the heat and simmer for 45 minutes.

Stir in shredded coconut, peanut butter, and green pepper and simmer for another ten minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with more shredded coconut and chopped unsalted peanuts.

*Yes, this is a blanket and general name for a stew that takes flavors from all over, most especially Morocco but also in the southern regions of Africa (and western as well). I do not pretend to be any kind of expert in these flavor profiles; I am simply experimenting and combining things that taste delicious, no matter how incongruous. I mean no disrespect.