Cooking Up A Storm: Beans and Cornbread (Tandoori Chicken on the Side)

Loneliness had me at the grocery store on a Saturday night with a two page long grocery list and new recipes to try. Inspired by the "Cooking" chapter from Country Wisdom and Know-How, a collection of recipes founded on the precept that you'll be using primary ingredients from squash to flowers, you're sure to see more of my efforts in preparing recipes from this book to come. It really is a tome of soul-to-table cooking

I'm keeping the "Cherry Clafouti with Rose-Flavored Ice cream and Rose-Scented Whip Cream" recipe for a future Valentines Date with a hot steamy lover.

This weekend, it certainly was a smorgashboard of culturally influenced recipes. Where did all these dishes come from?! My list included Rhubarb Bread (all that South Dakota rhubarb!), Harvard Beets (recent personal obsession with these purple bulbs), Chicken Tandoori (Lower East Side Indian food, please!), Artichoke Dip (this past Christmas...I surmise I was after comfort food, though eating this just made me feel all the more sad).

David and I recently text back and forth on a lonely morning. 

Me:Pancakes are lonely without you

David: Paincakes?

For dessert "Iny's Prune Cake" from Ree Drummond's The Pioneer Woman Cooks, (again Americana, I'm thinking of little white haired ladies living in now defunct towns with flags waving). The Date Cake recipe I found in The Encyclopedia of Vegetarian Cooking is so good, I am faithful that this prune cake will have the same moist, deep, rich goodness!

So there I am, driving back from the grocery store in pitch black darkness up the side of a mountain at 11 o'clock at night. 

Drummonds'  "Beans and Cornbread" recipe formed the basis for the food to come. The beans went on at around midnight.  Drummond intersperses personal prose with the recipes in her cookbook, and she was speaking to me.

   "Do you ever allow yourself to experience the wonderful simplicity of a big ol' pot of beans....I just throw a pot of beans on the stove and all my cares and concerns instantly melt away. Beans are magical like that."

I needed some of that magic. 

Don't get me wrong--I'm getting all kinds of positive response to the work I'm doing here in South Dakota. Five dudes from Portland are going to come play at my "Summertime BBQ," for crying out loud. What more could a girl ask for? All I can say is, we all struggle. I guess it chalks up to personal demons. 

The first observation I had after moving from a city of 8 million or so people to a town of 311 (that's three hundred and eleven people, in case you wondered, you're dead right) was that I could feel everything. I'm intense as it is. This is like Artistic submersion or something. Hold on, 'cause here we go!  Which again, don't get me wrong, I appreciate. I feel like I need to offer up a huge banquet table of thanks for all this goodness.

But back to midnight, pot of beans boiling on the stove, middle of the night pitch black darkness. There I am with a whole fryer chicken at the kitchen sink pulling out guts and breaking tendons and skinning the damn thing...it was so real. This chicken might has well have been animated talking to me. So I started talking to it.
"Thank you chicken. I am so sorry," and so on. 

Yeah, that was me. 

By 1 a.m. I'm starting to get kind of stressed out. There are chicken  pieces marinating in Tandoori spices in the refrigerator, and I've put the carcass in a pot of water to boil. I got to a point in the preparation of the thing where I couldn't cut meat from it's mini sized body any longer. I did the best I could and decided to make chicken stock with the rest. 

Now there's a chicken carcass and a pot of pinto beans boiling on the stovetop. I set the alarm for 2 a.m.  

In my half dazed kind of sleep I have a dream. 

"Those are Walla Walla onions" I say emphatically. 

That's it. That's the dream.

 Walla Walla is a farming town in Washington, the state where my life got its start. When I bought the $3 bag of yellow onions I didn't notice they were from Washington until I got back to the yurt and was putting them away. It brought me a sene of home to see Walla Walla onions (some of the best in the world) in my kitchen. 

Just before the alarm goes off I get myself up, turn the stove off, and let the beans and chicken stock cool as I sleep.

 In the morning I pour myself coffee in the huge "Terrier" mug which for some reason is comforting to me in its sheer largeness.

I make Sour Cream Pancakes, which weren't any good. It was either the on-its-way-out sour cream, or I just don't like Sour Cream Pancakes. I won't try making those again.

Then I put the Tandoori chicken in the oven. Mix up the cornrbread with fresh sliced jalapenos in it. Bake that in the oven right next to the chicken. Re-heat those pinto beans on the stovetop. Rinse the cilantro. Open a beer. 

I start to plot the BBQ menu for the boys from Portland, one of whom is vegan. I put the laundry in. Make a show poster. then I engulf that plate of food.

I feel slightly better now, if only because writing is a comfort to me. That and the pinto beans.

note: For two days the rain stormed and thunder clapped. As I complete this writing, the clouds have cleared. The sun is making its effort at shining once again.