Super Natural Every Day: Well-Loved Recipes from My Natural Foods Kitchen [A Cookbook]

INTRODUCTION

I LIVE IN A MODEST SIX-ROOM FLAT with twelve-foot ceilings on the second floor of a Victorian apartment in the middle of San Francisco. And by middle I mean that if you threw a dart at the center of a map of this city, you’d likely hit my house. My street dead-ends into an east-sloping neighborhood park, and when you stand at the front window you can watch a parade of pugs and pinschers, big kids on dirt bikes and small kids on scooters, dealers, joggers, and the occasional flute player go by. There are times when two girls set up a music stand in the shade and practice trombone.

San Francisco is a vibrant city that punctuates the top of a fist-shaped peninsula, contained on one side by the Pacific Ocean and flanked by its namesake bay on the other two. It is where the North American continent jets out of the sea in dramatic fashion before rumbling east. I’ve lived within a short drive of this coastline nearly all my life, and at the right moment, on the right day, in the right spot, there is no more inspiring place to explore.

Within reasonable walking distance of my front door, you’ll find plenty to eat and drink—paneer-stuffed kati rolls, freshly baked walnut levain, Neapolitan-inspired thin-crust pizzas, and egg sandwiches served on English muffins fresh from the oven. There is a teashop pouring silver needle, gyokuro, and monkey-picked oolong teas nearby. And as far as coffee goes, I often walk to one of the two coffee shops roasting beans on their premises. There is a boisterous bar worth braving just up the block with dozens of Belgian ales, IPAs, stouts, and hefeweizens on tap. And when I’m in the mood for something more low-key, the beer shop in the other direction has a similarly impressive selection in bottles I can take home.

There must be two dozen places to buy groceries. Some are chains; many are independently owned and small in scale. On any given afternoon I might stumble upon a box of purple rice grown by a workers’ co-op in Thailand on a shelf just a few feet from a jewel-toned jar of locally produced bergamot marmalade. Or, farm-fresh eggs a few hours old across the aisle from hand-harvested Mendocino nori. The farmers’ markets? There’s one nearly every day of the week, and choosing which to go to depends on how far I feel like walking.

But as exciting as urban living is, I often feel the pull of quieter realms. Drive an hour from where I am right now, and you might find yourself in the midst of a redwood grove, or standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, or making snowballs at the summit of one of the neighboring peaks. There have been mornings in late spring when I’ve found myself traveling through wildflower-lined highways in west Marin County, poppies spilling from the ditches to flood the black asphalt. Farther inland, in the summertime, you’ll find endless stretches of golden hills punctuated by the craggy silhouettes of old oak trees. In these moments, there are few places I’d rather call home.

I live here with my boyfriend, Wayne, and it’s against this backdrop that I cook each day. The markets, shops, and restaurants define the palette of ingredients I reach for; they influence the flavors I crave. The hills and vistas, blooming flowers, and candy-colored houses—they shape my overall aesthetic sensibility and inspire me to highlight the natural essence of each of the ingredients I choose to use.

Super Natural Every Day

This book is a glimpse into my everyday cooking, with the hope that some of what inspires me will inspire you as well.

I resisted the urge to include over-the-top, special-occasion productions. I left out recipes requiring all day Saturday and on into Sunday to prepare, and skipped the ones with six different components. Instead, I kept a simple notebook over the past couple years of my favorite everyday preparations—ones I revisit often. The recipes are rooted in whole and natural foods, typically feature a handful of seasonal ingredients, offer some inkling of nutritional balance, and (broadly speaking) come together with minimal effort.

For those of you with Super Natural Cooking, consider this a companion volume. Many of the building blocks I outlined in that book are put into practice here. Simply put—here are real foods and good ingredients made into dishes that are nourishing and worth eating and sharing.

Natural Foods

If you peek inside my kitchen cupboards you’ll probably notice I prefer my rice brown, red, purple, or black; and that I keep a spectrum of golden honeys close at hand. You’ll see soba noodles are allocated a good amount of real estate in the cabinets to the right of the stove, and heirloom beans have taken over 2 feet of shelf space on the left. You might (rightly) suspect my favorite section at the grocery store are the bins containing grains, dried beans, and flour.

I tend to cook with whole, natural foods—whole grains, whole grain flours, minimally processed sweeteners, and fresh produce—ingredients that are as seasonal and nutritionally intact as possible. I’d be misleading you if I said I don’t look forward to moments when I happen upon something new and special: a raw, vanilla-scented Fair Trade Certified cane sugar from the Philippines, or giant, golden salt grains from the Menai Strait in Wales. Those sorts of ingredients aside, a good portion of the food I buy is grown or produced locally. I find local ingredients taste better and often have a glow and vitality you don’t see in ingredients that have traveled long distances, particularly when you are talking about produce or perishables. And while I run the risk of sounding a bit preachy, supporting good ingredients grown or produced by people who care about our health and the health of our environment is something about which I feel strongly.

Some of you might be confused by the term natural foods. It is used in many different contexts, and it means different things to different people. By natural foods, I mean ingredients that are straight from the plant or animal. Or that are made with as little processing and as few added flavorings, stabilizers, and preservatives as possible, keeping nutrients and original flavors intact. For example, wheat berries ground into flour, grated coconut pressed into coconut milk, cream paddled into butter, or chopped tomatoes simmered into tomato sauce. For me, focusing on natural ingredients also means doing my best to avoid genetically modified and chemically fertilized crops, as well as dairy products that come from cows treated with growth hormones. I want each meal I eat to deliver as much nutritional punch as possible, and focusing on a range of real, minimally processed foods is the way I go about it.

I occasionally use unbleached all-purpose flour or white sugar, usually in baked goods, when using 100 percent whole grain flours (or less refined sugars) doesn’t quite deliver the results I want. For those of you who bake strictly with whole grain flours, I try to make note of what you can expect from using 100 percent whole grain flours in those recipes.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I’m vegetarian, and have been for a long time now. I’m happy to do what I can to leave a lighter environmental footprint on our planet, and I have enjoyed the challenge of shifting my way of cooking and eating to be lower on the food chain. For me, this means being vegetarian, buying a good percentage of my ingredients from local producers, and seeking out sustainably produced ingredients. That being said, it’s each individual’s own personal journey to work toward a way of eating that works for them. Many people seem to be looking for ways to incorporate more meatless meals into their repertoire for a whole host of reasons, and I’m happy to try to provide a bit of inspiration. Many of the recipes in this book, particularly the main dishes, welcome substitutions, and I encourage you to use some of the ideas as starting points. Go from there based on what is available in your area, or what your family likes to eat.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that while I try to shop, cook, and eat mindfully, I also do my best to remember why I was drawn into the kitchen in the first place—the punch of garlic hitting me in the face after being dropped into a hot pan, the perfume of chocolate wafting from room to room when a cake is in the oven, the explosion of color I discover every time I slice into a blood orange, or the pleasure of sharing a simple meal I’ve prepared with a group of friends or family. These are the sorts of things that get me excited to cook each day, and I do my best to let them inspire my time in the kitchen before all else.

Where I Shop

The cornerstone of my food shopping is a weekly trip to one of the nearby farmers’ markets. I stock up on whatever looks good, and typically this means a range of in-season fruits and vegetables, a dozen farm-fresh eggs (sometimes two), a container of locally made tofu, one of almond butter, and sometimes bread, if I haven’t baked a loaf myself.

I shop alongside many of the best chefs in the city. They push their carts from stall to stall, and I love to sneak glances at what they are buying for their kitchens. There are times, if I don’t feel like I’m imposing too much and if they don’t look like they’re in too much of a hurry, when I’ll ask what they are going to make with those flats of asparagus or those bundles of sorrel. Often, the farmers are also a good source of information and inspiration. One of my favorite recipes in this book, Kale Salad, came out of a quick chat over a banged-up box of purple peacock kale. Another time, while gathering ingredients for posole, I received an impromptu lesson in how to choose the most flavorful tomatillos—pick the small ones, those that are firm, with a deep blush of purple inside the papery husks.

When running low on ingredients between market visits, I head to one of the little grocery stores near my house. One in particular sources produce from local farmers and has even started to grow a few crops outside the city.

Aside from that, once or twice a month I go to the local natural foods co-op or Whole Foods Market to replenish pantry staples: primarily interesting grains, flours, beans, lentils, and various rices from the bin section.

Then there are a sprinkling of less-frequent visits to specialty stores where I cherry-pick wines, or cheeses, or artisanal sugars, special spice blends, offbeat oils, and vinegars.

My Everyday Pantry

While my everyday cooking is most often dictated by seasonal produce, I need to keep a supporting cast of ingredients on hand so I can put that produce to work in a variety of ways. I went into a lot of detail about the minutiae of individual ingredients (and some of their nutritional benefits) in Super Natural Cooking—specifically, how to build a natural foods pantry. Instead of repeating that here, I thought I’d open my cupboards, look to my shelves and fridge, and tell you about what you are likely to find in my kitchen on a day like today.

Before we get started, just a few notes. I’m not going to call out organic in every instance throughout this book. I suspect that would get tedious and turn off some of you. What I will say is that I care about supporting producers and farmers who are using sustainable farming methods. Many of those are certified organic; some of them aren’t certified, but are farming using organic practices. I read a report that over 160 million pounds of pesticides were sprayed in California in 2008, a statistic I find heartbreaking. I know we can do better, and I try to vote for that change with my grocery dollars. I buy dairy products from farmers who pasture-graze their growth hormone–free cows and I purchase eggs from farmers who keep small flocks of pastured hens. This is in part because I want to support the people providing these ingredients, and in part because I don’t want to be in a supermarket at some point without a choice in the matter.

OILS AND FATS I cook with a variety of oils and fats, and pick and choose which to use after considering a few things. Each fat and oil has its own flavor, scent, and mouthfeel—I think about how each of those elements might affect what I’m cooking. I look for cooking oils and fats made from good ingredients, which have been naturally pressed or produced without stripping them of their personality. Avoiding oils that have been processed with solvents, deodorizers, or heated to damaging temperatures is important. Then, once in my kitchen, I think about how each cooking oil stands up to heat differently, and take that into consideration, too.

I keep a few extra-virgin olive oils on hand. Of those, I typically have one that could be considered my day-to-day olive oil. I use this to sauté, roast, make sauces, and form the base of a variety of dressings and vinaigrettes. The other extra-virgin olive oils are more special (and costly), and I think about them as finishing oils. Some are spicy, some are grassy, but they’re all better enjoyed drizzled over soups, stews, or salads just before serving.

I like to cook and bake with butter, sometimes clarified, sometimes browned. You can make clarified butter yourself or buy it. Making it yourself is more economical. It has full, rich flavor and a substantially higher smoke point than olive oil. Certain curries really come to life when you use it to start things off, and you can combine it in a pan alongside olive oil to give the olive oil more range. I like to use brown butter in baking or for drizzling, as well as plain butter, both salted and unsalted.

Extra-virgin coconut oil is fun to experiment with, although its assertive coconut scent limits what I use it for. It’s great for baking, and you can sometimes replace all, or a portion, of the butter in a recipe with coconut oil. I use it in the early stages of some Thai-style curries, and in just about any cooking that has coconut milk in it.

I use little whispers of toasted sesame oil in my cooking, but it can be devastatingly overpowering. To say I’m judicious with it is an understatement.

Cold-pressed nut oils are nice to have on hand, particularly in the fall and winter when the weather cools and heartier