April 11, 2022

 

Dear everyone,

I am at loose ends.  Bread’s baking in the oven, and I have some free time on Saturday, so here I am again.  I do have another cooking tale (beyond the bread).  The Hinsdale Public Library sponsored a “Chopped!” challenge.  Chopped, if you are not aware, is a popular 60 minute TV show on the food network.  Four chefs are tasked with cooking an appetizer, a main course and a dessert for of a panel of judges.  They get 20 minutes for the appetizer, and 30 minutes each for the other two courses.  After each round, one of the contestant chefs is ‘chopped, and the by the end of the show one chef is left standing as the winner.  The trick is that for each round, each chef is presented with the same secret basket of ingredients that must be used in creating their dishes.  There are usually four items in the basket, and usually one doesn’t play well with the others.  The baskets can be sadistic (for instance, watermelon, sardines, pepper jack cheese and zucchini).  The chefs also have access to a well-stocked pantry and high end equipment.  (There are a lot of spin-off shows as well, like Chopped Teenagers, Chopped Champions, etc.).

Anyway, the library decided to have a challenge - - there are no judges or tastings; the winner will declared by voting from via Instagram, and based on photos and descriptions of each cooks’ dish.  This is a pretty minimal cost to the library, as you will see the ingredients they supplied ran under $5, and I don’t think they had more than 15 people up to the challenge.  I picked up my ingredients, and after a couple days of discussion, and some call outs to well known chefs (namely Tamara Brown, Nicola Brown, and Carolyn Walloch), Cindy and I came up with a recipe, which I will append to this letter, but first some pictures of what we made last Tuesday.

Secret ingredients: Canned black beans, lemon, dried cranberries, and chicken ramen

From our pantry: grape tomatoes, frozen corn, quinoa, habaneros, bell peppers, red onion, mango

Beans heated with corn and tomatoes, as well as chili and cumin powder, granulated garlic, salt

crushed ramen cooked in boiling water for 30 seconds

quinoa (cooked with chicken flavor packet) combined with bean mixture and partially cooked ramen. The final mixture is stuffed into bell peppers and baked

Salsa made of rehydrated cranberries, mango, bell pepper, habaneros, red onion, lemon juice

Baked stuffed peppers with salsa

Brief Description

 "We made a Mexican Style Stuffed Pepper which was served with a Spicy Cranberry-Mango Salsa. The pepper was stuffed with a combination of quinoa cooked with the ramen spice packet, partially boiled crushed ramen and a black bean/corn/grape tomato/spice mixture.

 The cranberries were rehydrated and combined with the juice of the lemon as well as mango, red onion, habanero, some bell pepper and olive oil to make a delicious salsa to accompany the stuffed peppers."

Last Sunday we went to our last opera this season, Tosca.  The plot of this opera is entirely too melodramatic, and ends in death for all involved, but the music is good and the singers performed well.  We also got to see the set change between acts 1 and 2, which was interesting.  Some of the sets weigh around multiple tons.  Masks are still required at the Lyric (not surprising, given the average age of an opera devotee), but many people around us were not wearing them in a serious manner.  I hope, like everyone else, there will not be a wave of the omicron variant as there is in Europe right now.  A second booster (the fourth shot) is now available if you over 50, but I want to put off getting it as long as possible - - the shots make me ill for a couple of days, and it is unclear to me how much and how long-lasting the protection of the fourth shot will be.  I plan on waiting until the case count begins to rise more significantly.

Of course, the world has other disasters waiting in the wings - - the Russian invasion (the upcoming French election after the ongoing calamity in Hungary), and an extremely frightening climate change report that I suspect will not be acted upon with alacrity.

Cindy and I also watched “Mare of Easttown” with Kate Winslet.  This is a seven part (seven hours) crime drama that takes place in a dysfunctional small town in eastern Pennsylvania.  The first three episodes were a bit slow, but it came into focus as it went on.  Still, the identity of the killer was still a surprise at the end of it.  And of course, the series was really not about the murder mystery, but about the detective and her friends and family.  We also watched the two day presentation on public television by Ken Burns about Benjamin Franklin.  I found it a bit slow, and not full of much that I didn’t already know.  I read Franklin’s autobiography as a freshman in college!  Franklin was a fascinating man, and definitely high on my list of “who would I want to be marooned with on a desert island”, or barring that, at least having a long ‘My Dinner with Andre’ conversation.

I’ve read some interesting books over the last couple of weeks.  Jade City, the first of a trilogy of an Asian gang fantasy; Pond – a set of short stories linked into a sort of novel - - beautiful writing (almost poetry sometimes), but I found it hard to follow - - I’m looking forward to reading her latest, Checkout 19; another piece of literary fiction, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, which I enjoyed enough that I have ordered up her earlier work, Optic Nerve, which I am betting is a book that Owen would like.  I also read a book by an Italian linguist, The Greatest Invention.  You can tell the author is from the continent - - I had trouble often trying to figure out what her thesis was.  Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems (according to what I understood from this book) that many early languages started out as some combination of rebuses and word play with homonyms.

It’s finally warming up a bit, maybe.  I’m going to take a birdwalk tomorrow before Aikido, and later in the evening we are going to our last Blackhawks game this season.  The Hawks were booed by the fans on Thursday - - they had about four minutes of power play (sometimes with 5 on 3), but were unable to put up any notable shots on goal - - and this was against the Seattle Kraken, who are arguably an even worse team than the Hawks this year.  At least the Cubs won their season opener.

Love, H

PS recipe below:

Secret Basket Ingredients:
1 Chicken flavored Ramen
14 oz can of Black beans
½  cup dried Cranberries
1 Lemon
 
Pantry Ingredients:
1 cup Quinoa
4 Bell peppers
1 Habanero pepper, finely diced
1/3 cup diced  red onion
1 medium mango, diced (about ½ cup)
1/2 cup Frozen corn
1/3  cup Grape tomatoes
Olive oil
Spices: 1 Tbl chili powder, 1 Tbl cumin powder, 1/2 teasp granulated garlic, pinch salt
 
Recipe
1) Cook Quinoa with standard instructions, adding Ramen chicken spice packet for flavor

2) Meanwhile, add about 1 teaspoon of olive oil in a medium saucepan, and then heat black beans,       frozen corn, and grape tomatoes.  Add, to taste, cumin, chili powder, granulated garlic, and salt.  Cook   only for about 5 minutes, just to burst the tomatoes, and to let the spices comingle

3) Crush the Ramen noodles into small pieces – less than ½ inch in length

4) Put the cooked quinoa and black bean mixture in a medium-large mixing bowl

5) Cook the crushed ramen for 30 seconds in boiling water.  Drain, and add to the quinoa/bean mixture

6) Cut the tops off of the bell peppers, and stuff the peppers with the quinoa/bean/ramen mixture. Set in a baking pan, cover lightly with foil, and bake at 375 for 25 minutes.  Remove foil and bake 400 for 10 minutes
 
While the peppers bake, make the cranberry mango salsa.
1) Rehydrate cranberries by covering with water and microwaving 30-60 seconds. Coarsely chop the   cranberries
2) Dice the leftover bell pepper, mango and red onion into a serving bowl
3) Add the juice of one lemon and 1 teaspoon olive oil
4) Add the cranberries and habanero
5) Mix and let rest