some kinda good

There’s pleasure and comfort in the stained pages of a long used and trusted cookbook. Tonight I pulled two such books from the shelf to find tried and true instructions for red massor dal and saag gosht.

Tomorrow is a friend’s last day at work, and he requested Indian from my kitchen for the send-off lunch. These recipes are some of the best “comfort /nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven” foods I know.

The massor dal – red lentil – recipe I began making in the early 1980s. It comes from Indian Vegetarian Cookery by Jack Santa Maria, a funky little paperback I bought at Eats, the Blacksburg Food Coop, for $3.78 – member price. My copy is now held together with bow-tied kitchen twine. It was published in the UK in 1973, is spiced with Hindu wisdom and food-related folk tales, is one of my favorite cookbooks, and has the easiest, tastiest dal recipe I know.

Another well-worn book was a gift from my mother in the mid-’80s. I was living in Mobile, Ala., and dear friend Kim invited me in for Indian – the culinary heavens opened for me that night when she served chicken kabuli, various curried vegetables, and homemade naan. It was my first taste of Indian cuisine, and Kim suggested Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni, if I wanted to try my hand at it. Boy, did I! Indian was my next culinary adventure, inspired in part by the non-existence of an Indian restaurant in Mobile. From 1,000 miles away in Virginia that book arrived by mail in time for me to open it on Christmas morning. Thanks, Mom!

Over the years, Julie Sahni has taught me a lot in those pages. Chicken kabuli is still a staple in my kitchen. But beautiful spinach at the Farmers Market inspired me to go for the spinach and stewed beef for the farewell lunch.

Perhaps I should say Seth inspired the whole evening of cooking and reminiscing about the loved ones for whom I have prepared these dishes. Tonight’s cooking is for you, Seth, on your departure from our professional environs – goodbye and wonderful things to you!

Both recipes follow.

Red lentils (massor dal)
From Indian Vegetarian Cookery by Jack Santa Maria

1 cup dry red lentils (these days, I use half tiny red massor dal in combination with half yellow moong dal. This suggestion came from the owner of the wonderful Durga grocery in Woodbridge, Va. It is the best Indian food shop in NoVa.)
1 tsp poppy seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp paprika or hot chili pepper flakes
1 tsp turmeric powder
1tsp salt
2 tsps dry coriander seeds
6 whole cloves
2 inch piece cinnamon
4 green cardamoms
1 cup grated coconut, dry unsweetened
4 black peppercorns
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons veg oil
2 onions, chopped

Wash the lentils and bring to boil with salt and enough water to cover. Cook at a slow simmer. Meanwhile grind all the remaining ingredients except onions and salt. [You can use already ground spices, especially cinnamon which is hard to grind, and add to the coconut and minced or ground garlic. You also could you a prepared curry powder or garam masala here, but you won’t get quite the same flavor. ]

Heat the oil and sauté the onions slowly until they are caramelized. This takes about 20 minutes, but you don’t have to stand and stir the entire time. Just don’t let them burn.

When onions are done, add the ground spice/coconut/garlic paste (masala paste) and fry for a few minutes. I usually turn down the heat and let this cook a bit longer than a few minutes. Let your nose tell you when it is ready – it will smell toasty.

When the lentils are soft and ready to serve,usually after about an hour, add salt to taste. They should be soupy as the masala mix will take up a good bit of the liquid when added. Stir the masala paste into the lentils, and add a little boiling water if need be to keep them a nice stew consistency. Serve with naan and/or hot rice.

Saag Gosht (Beef in Fragrant Spinach Sauce)
From Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking
Makes a lot – serves at least 8
3 cups cooked spinach
6 tablespoons light vegetable oil
3 lbs. beef stew meat, in 1 ½” cubes (lamb, goat, and venison also work well here)
3 1/2 cups thinly sliced onions
1 1/2 tablespoons minced garlic
3 tablespoons minced fresh ginger root
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 cup chopped tomato (can use canned)
3 green chiles, minced (use mild red peppers if you prefer)
3 tablespoons plain yogurt or sour cream
1 cinnamon stick, broken in small pieces
6 black, or 12 green, cardamom pods
9 whole cloves
3 bay leaves, crumbled
1 tablespoon salt or to taste
4 teaspoons garam masala or prepared curry powder
2 tablespoons light vegetable oil, if needed

Some people cook the spinach for an hour with the beef. I prefer to fold in the cooked spinach just before serving. You can substitute kale, collard, or mustard greens, or combine any of these with the spinach.

Cook and drain the spinach – you will need 3 cups in the end. You can use frozen spinach if you prefer, but it won’t be velvety. Set aside cooked spinach until needed.

Wash the meat cubes, dry on paper towels. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large frying pan (I use cast iron) over high heat until very hot. Sauté the beef in small batches so the frying pan is not overcrowded. You want the meat to brown, not steam.

After beef is all browned, set aside, covered. Add the remaining 4 tablespoons of oil to the frying pan, and add onions. Reduce heat to medium-high, and fry until they turn caramel brown, about 25 minutes. Careful not to burn them. Add garlic and ginger, and sauté a minute or two. Add cumin, tomatoes, and chiles, and continue sautéing until the tomato is cooked and the entire mixture is turned into a thick pulpy paste – maybe three minutes. Remove from flame, stir in yogurt. Cool mixture just long enough to puree it safely. I use a hand-held puree wand, but you can put it in a blender of food processor. Return puree to pot.

Next you’ll make a bouquet garni with a linen tea bag, a tea infuser, or cheesecloth. If using tea bag or infuser, lightly crush cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and bay leaves, then add to bag or infuser. If using cheese cloth, take a double layer about 6-inches square, add the lightly crushed spices, and bring the four corners up to make a little bag. Tie tightly with cotton twine. Add the spice bag/infuser to the vegetable puree in the pot. Also, add 4 cups of boiling water and the salt. Stir well. Add the browned meat, and simmer, covered, until the meat is tender. Depending on the meat, this can be from and hour to a little more than two hours.

When the meat is done, taste for salt. Remove the spice bag and squeeze it (cooled!) to get all the goodness out of it. Discard the bag. Add the cooked spinach and garam masala, and fold, gently. Return to a gentle heat for about five minutes. Let sit off the flame for ten minutes. Taste for salt. Add a little oil if it needs a little body, or you can stir in a few tablespoons of cream or sour cream.

This dish tastes better if made a few hours in advance, and allowed to rest at room temperature before being reheated and served. Refrigerate for two days or so, or freeze.
Defrost thoroughly before reheating. Serve with rice or naan.

The first house I owned had a half bath tucked under an upstairs eve. On the mirror over the rust-stained sink was a sticker that read, “Don’t floss all your teeth, just the ones you want to keep.”

I want to keep all my teeth. I use them a lot, I like them, and I like what they do for me.

Is there an excuse these days not to glide the slick white thread between the teeth? Space-age polymers and the like mean there’s no getting stuck and shredding like back in the bad old days of dental hygiene. So, for my pearly whites, the answer is “no.”

Dental floss starts with D, and on day four of gratiblogging, I am appreciative of it.

(my brand, with space-age polymers)

(Catlett's Station, around 1862)

Catlett was a little village when I was born and raised in there in the 1960s. The kids all went to church together until age 6, when they started going to school together, too. Our elementary – grades one through four – was four classrooms and a long cooler in the hallway for three-cent lunch milk. The building was wooden, painted white, with huge tall windows that opened to the breeze, and with a huge bell swinging in the belfry.

My great-great-grandfather had moved to the village when it was called Catlett’s Station, and he put a general store right on the railroad in 1866. Just four years earlier Jeb Stuart and his men had raided John Pope’s supply lines there, during second Manassas.

My father, who was born in 1931, farmed the same land his great-grandfather and grandfather had farmed. His father ran the mercantile, then still spitting distance from the railroad tracks. When dad was a kid, the business sold everything there from caskets and crackers to moonshine.

My grandmother and I walked hot rolls and soup to the shut-ins. Two curious men, Chicken and Preacher Parsons, strolled together all day, never working, living their lives to mystify me generate conversation around Catlett’s 6-o’clock-sharp dinner tables. Every summer the community had a fireman’s parade and a July Fourth celebration with fireworks and a hamburger stand.

Catlett held all manner of entertainment to a small child: fishing and digging and playing with friends. And it was the most boring place on the earth to a 16-year-old.

Catlett is still on the map; you can drive through it to places with names we’d never heard back then – Fair Oaks Mall, Nissan Pavilion.

But Catlett is gone, too. And I am grateful to have been there.

Winterbrook Farm

My friend Shannon proposed 26 Letters in 26 Days, in which one blogs for the first 26 days in November about 26 things one is thankful for and using the ordered letters of the alphabet. Sounds like fun and a good way to take stock of the good stuff. November snuck up on me or my mind is slipping or whatever; I’m a day late starting.

And, I’m starting now:

When my children were little, they had three little books their dad had from his childhood years in London. All were about Ant and Bee, an ant and a bee who were dear friends and who lived together in a Cup. Ant and Bee had adventures that took them on 26-page-or-so tours of the alphabet. They met a Dog, they had Tea, they walked by a Yew tree, they turned on a Spigot.

These were sturdy little volumes with homespun illustrations that made me feel grounded and safe. I loved the words, and I loved reading them to my kids. Each volume felt comfortable in my hands, manageable while I snuggled a child in one arm and carefully pointed out words and drawings.

Bee

Ant

I’m grateful for Ant and Bee, for grandparents who once were parents who read to a son who became a father who saved some books from long-ago London to read in 1980s Mobile and 1990s Fredericksburg to the children I cherish – Always.

My grandmother, who was of the Trumbos and Mathiases of West Virginia, grew the lima beans her family brought with them from the mountains. My father’s mother, she was the youngest of six and was happy to have been born in relatively flat, fertile southern Fauquier County, Va. She saved her limas every fall, as a handful of my cousins still do today.

When they started gardening in the 1950s, my mother and father turned from tradition and raised a Burpee climbing variety. They bought “fresh” seed each spring, until the early ’70s, when my mother read in the small, gray pages of Organic Gardening about Dr. Martin’s lima beans. The piece claimed Dr. Martin’s were the best beans anywhere, were hard to find, and were even harder to grow – but they were worth it.

A couple in New Jersey sent my mother her first seeds. Every year, my mother ordered from them. Through the years, they became good friends over the beautiful lime-green legumes, exchanging by mail not only seeds, but newsy letters, growing tips, and photos of the beans.

My mother and I swear Dr. Martin’s ruin you for other lima beans. They are tasty and enormous with a creamy texture. They never get mealy – even when the beans get to two inches long. Because of that, they grow on her farm, where what was nearly an acre of garden has shrunk to a small plot. And they grow in my little city yard, where there is barely enough sun to produce a worthwhile crop.

Mom lost track of the N.J. couple after the Mrs. had a stroke several years ago. Now, with no certain supplier, my mother carefully saves the seeds each year, as I do.

In Virginia, you’ve got to start Dr. Martin’s lima beans indoors well before the last frost. In mid-April, I soak the beans saved from the previous harvest. When they are soft, I tuck them in individual peat pots in the best soil I can find. A tray-full, covered with plastic wrap and settled on a warm heating pad, makes a cozy nursery. Usually I’ll see the burst bean emerge through the soil, surrounding the new leaves, in five to seven days.

After this, the plants need full warm sun or a grow light to produce sturdy stems and the characteristic emerald leaves so eager to climb. The full-size plants can reach 12-15 feet in the garden, so they’ll need strong support and lots of room to grow.

Plant them in the garden before the soil warms and they won’t do much but chill. Plant them in full sun in warm, rich soil, four-to-six feet apart and they’ll take off. Though they prefer tall supports, mine are homemade bamboo trellises that are about seven-feet tall. My mother has rows of permanent wire fences in her garden, devoted solely to her Dr. Martin’s.

Given what they need, the young plants will spend June laying vine and foliage, then the blossoms – and the bees – will come. Dr. Martin’s limas teach patience – the very minimum time I’ve waited to get the first single bean is 90 days from in-ground planting. To get a good mess of them takes four months of full sun, water, and no ground hogs.

Once the pods appear, leave them on the vine until they are heavy and full. Hold them up to the sunlight to check the bean size. But don’t judge Dr. Martin’s by other garden variety limas – let them get much larger. These beans are delicious even when they are one-and-a-half-inches long. Though you can eat them at any size, don’t let them hang until they harden and dry, except the ones you want to save for next year. Unless frost is imminent, I don’t harvest them unless the beans are at least an inch long.

Just as they were more than 30 years ago, Dr. Martin’s lima beans are still difficult to find. The first year I didn’t have my own, I ordered the Pennsylvania heirloom from the Landis Valley Museum. The New York Times reported that they are sometimes offered to members of the Seed Savers Exchange, and by Rohrer Seeds.

Every year when the heat of summer hits – after all the sprouting and the potting and the trellising and the growing – I SWEAR that I’ll never grow these pain-in-the-back beans again. Then, late August comes, with swelling pods and bees on beautiful blossoms and the promise of fall. By mid-October, the weather has turned cool, and I’m harvesting them under a blue sky, maybe shelling them with a friend as the leaves are beginning to put on a show. I cook up a pot, with a little butter and black pepper, and it’s all worth it. They really are that good.

Dr. Martin's lima beans, on the vine