This is a favorite meal of ours for those nights when we don’t have a lot of time, we hardly have any fresh vegetables in the house, and we want something with a lot of flavor and a definite comfort factor. Kheema is like the Indian equivalent of chile con carne, or sloppy Joe mix, or spaghetti sauce. There are many different versions – probably as many as there are cooks who make it – and it can be tweaked to accommodate whatever you have in your pantry, as long as you have 1. ground meat 2. chile peppers (fresh or dried) 3. canned tomato and 4. spices. Onions and garlic are helpful, but not absolutely required.

My favorite kheema recipe for when we have no fresh chiles in the house is from Madhur Jaffrey’s first book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking. It’s warm with onion and whole sweet spices as well as dried red chiles, and tastes wonderful. But our current favorite kheema is from the Parsi cookbook My Bombay Kitchen. It uses whole slit green chiles as well as cayenne pepper, so it has a complex spiciness, and it can be made as thick or soupy as you like, depending on how you’re serving it. We usually ladle it over white rice, but the last time we made it I griddled some fresh chapati and we spooned the kheema into the breads with yogurt and chutney. It could also be eaten straight out of a bowl, maybe with tortilla chips. Why not? Not to mention the possibilities of using it for stuffing samosas, or topping pizza.

And for breakfast, I can recommend making a sort of huevos rancheros with leftover kheema and runny fried eggs over sourdough toast or chapati or tortillas. Oh, yeah.

A note about the recipe: there are a few odd ingredients here, but please don’t be scared off by them. We keep curry leaves in our freezer, but the kheema will be perfectly fine without them. And don’t worry about the dhana jiru or the sambar masala – we happen to have both of those, because Jon loves to make spice blends at home, but you can either leave them out, or do what I do, which is to look up the blend, see what the major flavors are, and just add a few of the more important-sounding ones. I’ve indicated a few possible options in the recipe.

Kheema
Adapted from My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking by Niloufer Ichaporia King

• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 pound ground beef or lamb
• 2 green chiles
• 5-10 curry leaves (we keep these on hand in the freezer)
• 2-3 whole cloves
• 1 onion
• 1 small clove garlic, minced
• 1 tsp ginger, minced
• 1 tsp Dhana Jiru or garam masala or ground coriander (optional)
• 1 tsp Sambar Masala or ground fenugreek and mustard seeds (optional)
• 1/2 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro, plus more for garnish
• 1 can diced tomato
• 1-2 cups water
• 1 tsp salt

First, get your mise en place ready – you don’t want things burning while you measure spices. It really helps to have everything chopped and standing by before you start cooking.

Slit the green chiles from the tip up to the stem, leaving the stem end intact, and put them in a bowl with the curry leaves and whole cloves. Measure the various dry spices into another bowl. Dice the onion.

If you have fresh cilantro, chop up the leaves (some stems are fine) and set aside. We have cilantro in our garden right now, but if we happen to be out it’s not the end of the world. I love the flavor it adds, though.

Heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the curry leaves, cloves and chiles. When they have sizzled for a minute or so, add the onion and cook until soft. Add the ginger and garlic and cook a minute more, then add the dry spices and most of the chopped cilantro (remember to save a little to add at the end).

Add a can of diced tomatoes and stir well. Cook for a moment more.

Add in the ground beef and stir it into the sauce, breaking up all the chunks into small pieces, then add as much of the water as you like (you can always add more later to make it soupier). Mix in the salt. Bring it all to a boil, cover, and turn down the heat so it simmers. Cook about half an hour, stirring occasionally. This is a good time to make rice or bread.

The kheema is done when the meat is tender and the oils have separated out of the sauce. Sprinkle on the last of the cilantro, taste for salt, and serve!

Taking every leftover container out of the fridge and dumping it into a soup pot isn’t always a safe technique (or a good idea), but in this case it turned out to be the right thing. We had a few braised short ribs left, and I wanted to stretch them out into a full meal. I had a few other things to use up, and I decided that soup would be perfect, with a slight middle-eastern slant to it.

I started the soup with a bit of onion and garlic sizzled in olive oil, then added a sprinkle of ground cumin and hot paprika. Half a preserved lemon went in, roughly chopped. I thawed a container of broth made from 7-spice roast chicken, so it had a bit of sweet cinnamon flavor to it, and added it to the pot, then stirred in short grain rice and let it simmer.

When the rice was almost done, I added the cut-up short ribs and their juices (including braised leeks), some roasted bell peppers left over from tacos, and some cooked asparagus and roasted fingerling potatoes. A random assortment of stuff, maybe, but it pulled together beautifully in the spiced broth, with the rice as the unifying theme. Delicious, warming, and cheap.

I’m not feeling very verbose today, but I want to get this post up while I’m thinking about it. What am I thinking about? Pot beans with chimichurri. I’m not sure why I stumbled across this combination, but it was wonderful and we’ve eaten all the leftovers and now I’m going to have to make it again very soon.

I used speckled Vaquero beans from Rancho Gordo, soaked in salt water, then rinsed and cooked with onions and garlic fried in bacon fat. The beans had a soft texture and nice flavor, and kept their pretty spots much better than I expected. They were good by themselves, but with a drizzle of chimichurri on top – woof! It was incredible. I ate a whole bowl of just beans and sauce for lunch yesterday, with a piece of good sourdough bread.

The chimichurri I made this time was a bit different than the one I described back in February. I used a recipe from Francis Mallmann’s amazing book Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, which goes like this:

Chimichurri Sauce

• 1 cup water
• 1 Tbsp kosher salt
• 1 cup fresh parsley
• 1 cup fresh oregano
• 2 tsp red pepper flakes
• 1 head garlic, broken apart and peeled
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Bring the water to a boil, stir in the salt, then set aside to cool.

Mince the garlic and chop the parsley and oregano. Combine them all in a bowl with the red pepper, then stir in the vinegar, oil and salt water. Refrigerate until ready to use, up to 2-3 weeks.

This makes a sauce which is more like a very pungent vinaigrette, rather than a pesto-like puree. Since I made this batch, we’ve ladled it over the previously mentioned soupy cooked beans, as well as grilled steaks, grilled bread, scallions, and fried eggs, and I could certainly support using it as a salad dressing or to dip steamed vegetables in. I cut my oregano plant down to the base to make this, and now I can’t wait until it grows back in.

This stroganoff was one of those dinners that naturally arises by examining a number of random leftovers: in our case, a container of lebni, a bag of mushrooms, some partial leeks and a bunch of fresh dill left from our post-Easter brunch. Combine all that with some sliced seared steak and some egg noodles and you have a really good quick beef stroganoff.

I don’t think it would have occurred to me to use lebni in a stroganoff, but I liked the effect. It’s similar to sour cream but has a denser texture and is slightly less tart. It worked great with the mushrooms and dill. Come to think of it, that would be a really nice dip or spread right there – maybe I’ll try that next time I have these particular leftovers in the house.

We eat a lot of greens around here, especially this time of year. Usually, just sauteed with olive oil and some slivered garlic, but occasionally done more elaborately with bean broth. I may once have tried simmering some kale with chicken broth, but it didn’t seem to add much. However, I recently obtained a copy of Paula Wolfert’s cookbook, The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the first recipe I really looked at was the intriguing meat-braised greens. It called for beef bones, and -hello!- I have a lot of beef bones in my freezer. Definitely worth trying.

The technique here is to sear beef or lamb bones in butter (with the pan covered), then add a cup of water, salt and pepper and simmer until the resulting broth is reduced down to just a few tablespoons. The bones removed, you cook mixed greens in the rich broth. You could certainly obtain a similar result by starting with pre-made beef broth and simmering it down, but I have a feeling that starting with bones gives a particularly tasty result.

You can use any dark leafy greens for this. I often buy lacinato kale or rainbow chard, but for this recipe I settled on a mix of beet greens and spinach. The recipe directs you to blanch the greens first, but I like the bitterness of unblanched greens, so I just wash them and chop them before the final cooking. I don’t cook them too long (maybe ten minutes), although if you were using something tougher like collards you might want to give them a longer simmer.

As suggested, I served the greens with a good dollop of Greek yogurt blended with raw garlic, salt and dried mint. The greens were delicious, with a definite beefy flavor, and the yogurt was the perfect complement. We also threw in some lamb chops and a bit of cooked buttered orzo. And I threw the cooked bones into a pot with some water and simmered them again to make a light beef broth for the freezer.

I’m beginning to think I should just call this blog “Sandwiches on the Brain.” I seem to get a lot more excited about making sandwiches out of the leftovers of something than I do the original dish. I made a beautiful roast beef last weekend, complete with Yorkshire pudding (I made the mistake of looking through The River Cottage Meat Book), and it was delightful…but it’s the roast beef sandwiches that are really rocking my boat this week.

The beef was a rolled and tied cross-rib roast from our grassfed freezer cow, rubbed with fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden, and roasted just until perfectly rare. Sliced, a lot of the nice herb rub came off, so the largest pieces didn’t actually have any seasoning, but they still had a good beefy flavor. I made a special trip down to the co-op for a loaf of Samish Potato Bread, one of my favorite Breadfarm products – it has a nice sourdough tang, and the potato makes it spongy enough to soak up a lot of juices without falling apart. The first few days I stuck to a formula of mayo, horseradish, beef, lettuce, and jarred piquillo peppers, but the very last of the beef was consumed with a good dollop of sauerkraut instead. Mmmm.

We have rather a lot of beef in our downstairs freezer, thanks to the half a cow we buy every couple of years, so any time the urge for steak strikes we tend to go with it. It’s a wonderful excuse to make chimichurri sauce, a traditional Argentinian concoction of parsley, lemon, hot pepper and olive oil. And as it turns out, it’s even better on roasted mushrooms than it is on beef. A little bit spooned into an omelet was a good move as well. Actually, I’m not sure what it wouldn’t be good on.

We looked through quite a few books looking for different chimichurri recipes. Some use lemon juice, some use vinegar. Some are just parsley, but many add oregano as well. All versions are good – you could basically make up your own depending on the ingredients at hand. We just tried a version out of one of our street food cookbooks, and it turned out spectacular. It was very liquidy, though – not a problem as long as everything on your plate tastes good with chimichurri sauce, because it’s all going to get souped up together. You could probably thicken it up by adding a lot more chopped fresh herb and folding it in at the end.

We’re planning on making this quite a lot this summer, especially once we get the grill out. I’m keen to try chimichurri on grilled eggplant. And lamb. And fish. And, of course, more steak.

Chimichurri

Adapted from Street Food by Tom Kime

• 3 dried red chiles
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1/4 cup vinegar
• juice of 2 lemons
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 bunch parsley, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp or so dried oregano (or a small bunch of fresh, if you have it)

Stuff all the ingredients into a small food processor and zizz until it’s the texture you want. You could save out some of the parsley, chop it and stir it in at the end for a different effect.

It’s always a bit odd to make a new recipe, taste it, then realize that you don’t know whether it turned out or not, since you have no idea of what it’s supposed to taste like. When we made dan dan noodles for the first time, it may or may not have been a success.

What I do know is that the noodles were flavorful, the sauce had an interesting sweet/spicy/salty tang, and the Sichuan pepper gave it so much ma that I couldn’t feel my mouth for half an hour afterwards. So perhaps it was a success. We decided to try it again another time.

That was our first time using Tianjin preserved vegetable, a fermented cabbage product that we had just recently found at a little Chinese market in Seattle’s International District. According to Fuchsia Dunlop, mistress of all things Sichuan, it’s not quite a perfect stand-in for traditional Sichuanese fermented vegetable, but it comes close. The flavor of it was sweet, a little funky and really, really, really salty. We keep trying to decide if we want to replace it when we use up the jar, or just use cabbage and lots of salt instead.

It was also our first use of Chinkiang vinegar, which we found at the same market. It’s made from glutinous rice, and has a surprisingly sweet, almost plummy aroma. The combination of the vinegar with the salty cabbage produced a really interesting flavor for the noodles.

Here is the recipe for the version we made the first time. It was pretty good, but seemed to be lacking something.

Dan Dan Mian (version one)

loosely adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop

8 oz dried or fresh wheat noodles (preferably not egg noodles)

The sauce:

• 1 Tbsp oil
• 4 Tbsp preserved veg
• 1 1/2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar
• 1 tsp ground Sichuan pepper

The meat:

• oil
• 4 dried red chiles
• 4 oz ground beef
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• pinch of salt

Put on a pot of water for the noodles.

In a wok over high heat, add a tablespoon of oil, then add the preserved vegetable and stirfry it for 30 seconds or so. Scrape out into a large bowl. Add the vinegar and Sichuan pepper.

Putting the wok back on the heat, add a bit more oil, then throw in the dried chiles. Stirfry briefly until they begin to brown a little, then add the meat and stirfry until it is cooked through and partially dried out. Add soy sauce and salt. Transfer the meat to the bowl with the sauce ingredients and stir.

Cook the noodles according to directions, drain them and add them directly to the bowl. Toss everything together and serve.

Just last week we made dan dan noodles again. This time we had thought ahead and made fresh chili oil, and we followed a different version of the recipe that called for fresh ground pork. The difference was astonishing.

The previous batch had been a little dry, and both spicy and numbing without actually being very savory. This batch was oily, salty, savory, slithery, and completely addictive. We didn’t have to ask ourselves whether it had come out right – we just inhaled it.

Dan Dan Mian (version two)

Also adapted (not as loosely) from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop

10 oz somen or other wheat noodles

The sauce:

• 1 Tbsp peanut oil
• 4 Tbsp preserved vegetable
• 3 scallions, thinly sliced on the diagonal
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 3 Tbsp chili oil
• 1 1/2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar
• 1/2 tsp ground Sichuan pepper

The meat topping:

• peanut oil
• 6 oz ground pork
• 1 tsp sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce

Heat a spoonful of peanut oil in a wok, toss in the preserved vegetable and stir-fry for thirty seconds. Scrape into a mixing bowl. Add the rest of the sauce ingredients to the bowl.

Put the wok back on the heat, add another spoonful of oil, and add the pork. Break up with a spatula, and add the sherry and soy. Cook until done but still wet, and add to the bowl of sauce.

Cook the noodles according to directions (somen take almost no time at all), drain, and add them to the bowl. Toss well and serve.

I don’t normally have the attention span to eat the same thing every day, but I ate this sandwich for lunch three days running and was still not tired of it. I kept trying to decide whether to change it up a bit, add a different condiment…and then made it exactly the same way. Again.

This all came about because we thought a particular day was going to be cold and rainy, so we planned a pot roast. As it turned out, the weather all week was ridiculously warm and springlike, but once the beef was defrosted it was too late to back out. We based the braise on the Yankee Pot Roast Redux recipe in Molly Stevens’ All About Braising, using a rolled and tied cross-rib roast from our freezer and cooking it in Strongbow cider, chicken broth and onions, with carrots and potatoes going in near the end. It was fabulous, and we ate it two nights running with polenta and shredded Brussels sprouts, but there were still many leftovers.

Having thought ahead to this predicament, I had picked up a bag of rosemary potato rolls at the co-op, made by the Breadfarm, a wonderful bakery in Edison. These rolls, like so much the Breadfarm does, are spectacular – sour and chewy, with coarse salt on top and plenty of fresh rosemary scattered throughout. When it came time to make my sandwich, I cut a roll in half, toasted it lightly, spread it with mayonnaise (Best Foods), and fit a slice of pot roast onto it. I also remembered that we had a bag of cilantro in the fridge, so I pulled out a few sprigs to add. Squished down well, the ingredients melded together, and positively sang.

I ate that first sandwich and immediately made another.

It was hard to know what to eat after getting home from Duckfest. We’d eaten so much good food, I found myself wanting meals relatively light on carbs but not too depressingly healthy. I didn’t want to give us whiplash, after all.

This was a dinner that really hit the spot. Jon made up his favorite recipe for kofte kebabs with a mix of beef and lamb, but turned it into meatloaf instead of individual burgers or kebabs. I roasted a panful of cauliflower florets tossed with olive oil, cumin seed and mustard seed, and stirred up some yogurt with fresh garlic, dried mint, salt and pepper.

It was the perfect combination of comforting, spicy and virtuous.