When I made smoky fried chickpeas, I didn’t even come close to using the entire bag, so I followed Deb’s suggestion and cooked up some spinach to go with them. It was a smart idea.

Here’s my advice to you:

Do you still have some lumps of spinach taking up space in your freezer? Haul it out right this very minute and set it on the counter to thaw!

No spinach on the premises? Buy some spinach seeds and plant them ASAP!

No space for a garden? Head to your local farmer’s market and buy yourself a hefty sack of green!

And here’s some more advice, un-spinach related and free of charge to boot:

Kids whining when you give them work? Give them more work!

Tired of washing clothes? Don’t wear any!

Sick of seeing your progeny planted in front of the TV for hours on end? Haul the box out to the back yard, hand them some baseball bats, and let them show you what kind of damage they can do!

Your electric bill is too high? Don’t turn on the lights!

Husband left his dirty clothes on the floor by the bed? Toss them out the window!

Any other problems, vegetal (ha! no pun initially intended) or familial? Send them my way and I’ll solve them for you. I’m going through a logical phase.

Back to the spinach and chickpeas. Make this dish, okay? It’s nourishing and satisfying, not to mention tasty as all get out.

My mother ate hers with a dollop of yogurt on top, and I’ve been eating it that way ever since.

It’s the logical thing to do.

Chickpeas with Spinach
Adapted from Deb at Smitten Kitchen

This dish can be eaten many different ways: atop buttered toast, as a side dish with a scoop of plain yogurt, or, when topped with a runny fried egg (don’t turn up your nose! it’s good!), as a main dish.

6 tablespoons olive oil
½ cup bread crumbs (or one thick slice of bread, crumbled)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 10-ounce package frozen spinach, drained (or one pound fresh, rinsed)
½ teaspoon cumin
½ pound dried chickpeas, cooked and drained (or two 15-ounce cans)
3/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
½ cup tomato sauce
½ cup oven-roasted tomatoes, chopped, optional
dash of smoked salt
½ – 1 teaspoon salt
pinch of red pepper flakes
black pepper
1 ½ tablespoons red wine vinegar
lemon wedges

Saute the bread crumbs in three tablespoons of olive oil. Once the bread starts to brown, add the garlic and cumin and continue to saute till the garlic is brown. Transfer the garlicky crumbs to the blender, add the vinegar, and briefly whirl.

Put the remaining three tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet and saute the spinach. After the spinach has wilted (or just heated through, if using frozen), add the remaining ingredients (including the toasted bread crumbs), except for the lemon. Heat through, adding more tomato sauce (or some water) if you’d like it to be a little less thick. Taste to correct seasonings (you may want to let it sit for a couple hours to give the flavors time to meld), and serve hot, with lemon wedges.

About one year ago: Spinach-Cheese Crepes.

Menu planning is all the rage, it appears. It may have been the rage for many years, but somehow I missed it.

Or rather, I intentionally side-stepped it. When I caught on that responsible cooks were supposed to do menu planning, I rolled my eyes and sucked in my breath. How boring! Menu planning was too limiting for a creative cook like me! I mean, where was the room for improvisation and inspiration? For leftovers? For falling in love with a new dish and eating it for supper (and lunch and breakfast) three days in a row? Nope, sorry, huh-uh. There was no way I could ever settle down enough to follow a menu.

That didn’t mean I was opposed to making food-centric lists. (“Food lists” differ from “menus” in that there is no time-frame attached, see?) When we got our first foster child, two months after acquiring The Baby Nickel, a bread baby, and two blood transfusions (it was a busy couple months), I panicked (and continued to panic for the next ten months until that particular foster daughter left our home). How would I ever be able to turn out two full meals a day, plus have enough snacks on hand to feed my exploding household? So I sat down at the computer and whipped out some menu ideas. I listed off dishes that centered around beef, beans, chicken, pasta, and pork. I jotted down a variety of lunches, breakfasts, healthy snacks and quick desserts. Then I stuck the list to the fridge with a giant cow magnet and went on about my life. The menu list still flutters from its spot on the freezer door, though now it’s all crinkly-edged and scuffy. I peek at it only once in a blue moon, or maybe every other blue moon, but it served its purpose back in the day, relieving my overloaded psyche. For that I am grateful.

(A note about the cow magnet. Do you know what cow magnets are? They are giant rectangular magnets—several inches long and heavy, heavy—that farmers feed to their cows [ours came from Mr. Handsome’s father whose job was to drive a truck around to farmers and sell them things…like cow magnets] after they’ve gotten into a junk pile and accidentally eaten copious quantities of nails. The magnet is like a nail-oriented pied piper—as it shlups through the intestines it summons all wayward metal objects until they are finally joined together like a pointy, over-sized amoeba. The metal amoeba is then ejected out of the cow [OUCH!] in the form of a steamy, hot, extra-heavy patty in a field of daisies somewhere. I don’t think the magnets get recycled, but I could be wrong. As far as I know, ours were brand new.)

You’ve probably already figured out where this post is going: I now make weekly dinner menus.

Yes, it’s a veritable “eat crow” fest around here. It always happens to me when I have an opinion about something. Opinions are dangerous, mark my words, and the pied piper of crows, if you get my drift.

I don’t make menus all the time, maybe once every other week, but I find that when I sit down for a little planning, my week goes smoother, we eat a more balance diet, I plow through more of our food supply, and the kids fuss and whine less. Go figure.

I also (and this is where the chunks of crow get particularly hard to swallow) seem to be more flamboyant in the realm of creative cooking. Instead of my standard all-or-nothing technique (lots of new recipes or none at all), I start by making two lists—one of basic crowd-pleasers (spaghetti, beans and rice, pizza, potato soup) and another of all the new and exciting food I want to make. Then I go about sprinkling in the new amongst the old. This way we’re less likely to end up with a meal of spinach soup, Asian sweet potatoes, crackers and peanut butter, a funky butternut squash salad, and whiskey-soaked raisin Irish bread … and a passel of still-hungry kids.

This kind of makes me sound organized. I’m not. I don’t always even get around to making a menu. Like this week—I’m making stuff up as I go along. We’re eating just fine, but the task of feeding everyone weighs on me extra heavy—each meal is a hurdle that needs to be overcome. With that heavy feeling, it’s hard to find the space to be inspired or to pull together more than a quick meal.

My cooking inspiration comes from a variety of sources (blogs, magazines, cookbooks) and all the hundreds of ideas ping around in my head, cluttering my mind and weighing me down. Therefore, in an attempt to free up my brain space, I recently attempted to reorganize the chaotic state of my recipe files. Sort of.

Up till now, I’ve been operating with the following:

*A traditional recipe box, significantly unorganized. It’s broken down into breads, desserts, main dishes, veggies, and odds and ends. Nothing is alphabetized. Only I can find recipes in there, and even then it’s hit or miss.

*A three-ring binder filled with photocopied recipes, newspaper clippings, and bits of paper with hastily scrawled recipes, often without even a title to identify them by.

*A little spiral notebook that I’m forever misplacing.

A number of years ago, before my internet awakening, I developed the habit of frequenting Books-A-Million (first) and Barnes and Noble (later) for my get-away breaks. I would carry this little notebook with me and research recipes, jotting them down in the notebook whenever I found one that appealed to me. Towards the end of the book, I started jotting down some recipes from the internet.

Here is the one for French Chocolate Granola, a classic if there ever was one. Our adoration (not an exaggeration in the least—make it once and you will be a follower for life) is plain as day, no?

*Another folder with a large selection of copied and clipped recipes.

*And of course there is the blog recipe index, something I refer to with increasing frequency.

I recently set about remedying this recipe overload problem with a new notebook. Oh goodie! One more thing to add to the confusion! This notebook doesn’t clean up any of the current chaos, it’s just my new focal point in the hopes that future chaos will be minimized. The large notebook is divided into three sections with two orange dividers.

The first section I use for menu planning, the second section is for recipe ideas and notes, and the third section is a record of meals I’ve served for company.

Switching gears: Saturday’s supper came around faster than I anticipated, and because I was menu-less, I was at a total loss.

After gazing into the bowels of the fridge and staring vacantly at my pantry shelves, I settled on oven fried potatoes … and a quart of corn. I only made a single batch of the fries, definitely not enough for my oven fry freakazoids, so we filled up on popcorn later.

In the spirit of slap-dash recipe filing, haphazard menu-making practices, and quick meals, give these oven fries a whirl, okay? You follow a menu? Scribble them in! You don’t know what to make for supper tonight? Make these! …and then draft a recipe for next week with these potatoes on it. I guarantee they’ll taste a lot better than crow.

Oven Fries

One recipe makes enough for a side dish for our family; if it’s to be the main course, double it.

6 large potatoes
olive oil
1/3 cup flour
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, the powdered kind
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Wash the potatoes (no need to peel) and cut into uniform wedges. Drizzle them with some olive oil (maybe a quarter cup?) and toss to coat.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cheese, and seasonings. Sprinkle over the potatoes and toss to coat.

Brush a couple rimmed cookie sheets with more olive oil. Arrange the potato wedges, cut side down, in rows. Do not overlap them. Do you think you’ll need more salt? If so, add it now.

Bake the fries at 400 degrees, on the bottom oven rack. When their undersides are nicely browned (after 10-20 minutes, depending on your oven), remove the pan from the oven and flip the potatoes. Return the pan to the oven and bake till the other side is golden brown (another 10-20 minutes).

Serve with ketchup. Leftovers (lucky you!) are delicious with scrambled eggs.

About one year ago: My excuse.

I made grape kuchen and I’m so puffed up with pride that I nearly floated off over the ridge behind our house.

The recipe involved eggs, sour cream, lemon, and grapes. I measured and mixed next to a large pile of daffodils that Sweetsie had deposited on my red concrete counter top. (She said she was going to set them afloat again, but I think she forgot.)

The bright colors and tangy-tart smells made my heart race. Forget lovin’ on me, babe. Just give me some deep purple and sunny yellow against a backdrop of red. Mm, mm, mm. Does me in every single time.

This is the first time I’ve made kuchen (pronounced “kü-ken”—see, it really was my first time—I didn’t even know how to pronounce it!) and I’m completely enamored. There’s something deeply satisfying about the rich yeasty bread dimpled with fruity sauce and a tangy-sweet glaze drizzled over all.

I’ve been searching for a way to use up some of my frozen grape preserves. Last summer when I was processing grapes (pinching off the skins, cooking and straining the seedy innards, adding the peels back in and cooking the whole thing up into a royal purple pulp fit for the Queen herself), I set aside some of the precious filling to freeze instead of can. My canned grapes have a tendency to unseal and send me plummeting to the depths of despair, so I needed to try something different. It was a wise move on my part. The frozen grape puree tastes cleaner and brighter and it’s a snap to turn it into pie filling—simply thicken with sugar and flour (or cornstarch or Therm Flow) and it’s ready to go.

But still, I wanted a new way to serve my grapes besides in a pie, so I scoured the web. This grape kuchen was my reward.

This morning I told the kids they could have some grape kuchen after they finished their granola, and clueless Miss Beccaboo, bless her ditzy heart, said, “Huh? Great cooking?”

She said it, not me!

I need to know two things please. They’re very important. First, have you made kuchen before, and if so, how do you make it? And second, do you have any other suggestions for how to use up my frozen grape preserves?

Thank you, m’darlings. I’m much obliged.

Grape Kuchen with Lemon Glaze
Adapted from a recipe I found on ifood

Don’t be put off by the different stages and steps. This kuchen is really quite simple to make.

I imagine the variations are endless:
*Instead of a grape sauce, try blueberry, apricot, sour cherry, or rhubarb. Oo000!—what about red raspberry-rhubarb!
*Add some lemon or orange zest to the dough (I’m definitely doing this next time).
*Add nuts to the streusel.
*Use a plain vanilla glaze, or flavor it with almond extract or orange juice. Maybe add some cream cheese, too?
*There’s also the option of using a sourdough base instead of the commercial yeast. I want to look into this next.

About the grape puree: I won’t lie to you. Processing grapes is a time-consuming affair. It goes something like this:
1. Pick the grapes.
2. Pick the grapes off the stems.
3. Wash the grapes.
4. Squeeze out the grape innards (clear, seedy, eyeball-like blobs).
5. Put the eyeballs in a kettle and reserve the grape skins.
6. Cook the eyeballs till they melt.
7. Smoosh the melted eyeballs through a sieve, thus removing the seeds.
8. Put the melted, seedless eyeball mush back in the kettle and add the grape skins.
9. Cook till heated through.
10. Can (hot pack them), or cool and freeze.

I will understand if you’d rather use blueberries.

For the grape filling:
2 cups grape puree (see headnote)
1/3 cup sugar
1 ½ tablespoon flour
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Put the grape puree in a heavy bottomed saucepan. Stir together the sugar and flour and add it to the grapes. Cook the grapes over medium-high heat till bubbly and slightly thickened (though they will still be saucy). Stir in the lemon juice and set aside.

For the dough:
2 teaspoons yeast
½ cup warm water
½ cup butter
½ cup sugar
½ cup milk
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, beaten
½ cup sour cream

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water.

Scald the milk and add the butter.

Stir together the flour, salt, and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add the milk (once the butter has melted) and stir well. Check with your finger to make sure the mixture isn’t too hot, and then add the dissolved yeast. Stir in the beaten eggs and sour cream. Spread the mixture in a greased 9 x 13 inch pan, cover, and let rise for twenty minutes.

For the streusel:
½ cup flour
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup brown sugar
4 tablespoons butter

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix with your fingers till crumbly.

For the lemon glaze:
2 cups confectioner’s sugar, sifted
juice of one lemon (about 2-3 tablespoons)
a little milk, if needed

Combine the sugar and lemon juice, adding milk as necessary to make a drizzle-able glaze.

To assemble:
Once the twenty minute rise is finished, sprinkle half of the streusel over the dough. Pour the grape puree over top, using the back of a spoon to spread it out evenly-ish. Top with the rest of the streusel.

Using a skewer (or a knife) poke holes—eight to twelve, perhaps—in the batter to allow the grape filling to seep down through and infiltrate the whole cake with its fruity richness. (It won’t look like any infiltrating is happening, but it is.)

Cover the kuchen with plastic wrap and allow it to rise for another 45 minutes.

Bake the kuchen at 375 degrees for 30-40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean and the cake is pulling away from the edges. Don’t over bake—dry kuchen isn’t so hotsy-totsy.

Allow the kuchen to cool for at least 30 minutes before glazing and serving. It’s best served warm, but the cake is still mighty tasty the following day.

About one year ago: Flaunting My Ignorance.