Festival Time

Clearly this blog is not written by someone dealing with the record high temperatures of summer 2012.  Who else is cooking up pots of lentil soup and pans full of rice and beans as they try to stay cool in 100+ heat and/or have lost power due to summer storms?  July in San Francisco is cool, grey and foggy.  We do get our sunny, warm days but warm is a high in the low 70's, maybe.

But, there is warm sunny bright spot in all that cool grey fog and it's the High Sierra Music Festival. Four days of music, fun, friends, more music, blue skies, sunny days and blessed, blessed real, honest, sun created HEAT.  So hot you can go swimming, so hot you carry a mister around with you all day long, so hot you are rousted from your tent as soon as the sun peeks over the horizon.  Not this year, thanks to luck and a strategically placed tarp and sun shade set up.  Luck because someone else set it up and my tent just happened to be in the right spot to take full advantage of shade until 11:00am everyday.  Shade luxury. 

With four full days of music and camping you are going to need some serious sustenance to get through it .  You can eat every meal from the food vendors but that gets boring, and expensive.  You could also bring your camp stove and cook your own dinner but that takes time.  Time that could be better spent lolling around under a shade tent listening to some great music.  Which leaves you with prepared food.  With a little bit of work at home you can eat delicious food with minimum hassle.   I cook up food that can be eaten easily, food that has protein to keep you dancing, food that appeals when it's warm out and food that will still taste good after a few days in a cooler.  

After years and years and many music festivals I think I finally have the food plan down.  There have been some errors, cut up strawberries do not last, carrots and hummus seem good but, they take forever to eat.  Ditto peanut butter and anything. 

First up breakfast.  Here is where the breakfast bread is king.  Easy to eat, tastes delicious and zero prep work at the festival.  I opt for banana bread with chocolate chips but any breakfast bread will work; zucchini, lemon poppy seed, walnut and whatever.  But, banana bread is my favorite and banana bread loaded with chocolate chips is even tastier so chocolate chip banana bread it is.   

What about my morning caffeine?  I usually opt for the canned Starbucks or Trader Joe's coffee.  Pretty tasty and they do the trick but they can be too sweet for my preference.  This year my friends made their own coffee at home sweetened and creamed to their own specifications and transported it in a water bottle to the festival.  I am impressed with their ingenuity and will definitely be trying that next year.

I use my Mom's banana bread recipe.  I have two versions, one told to me over the phone by my Mom and another written down from my Mom and somehow they are different.  One calls for 1/4 cup oil which I imagine makes it moister but after skipping that one time I had no problem leaving it out of future versions.  I have yet to run into a too dry banana bread. 

Tomorrow, daytime festival food.  Today, here is breakfast.

Mom's Chocolate Chip Banana Bread
1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3-4 ripe bananas
2 eggs
2 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate chips

Cream together butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add bananas and eggs and mix until combined.

Sift together flour, baking soda and salt.  Add to wet ingredients and mix together.  Stir in chocolate chips.

Pour into greased bread pan and cook at 350 about 1 hour.  A toothpick should come out clean when inserted into the middle. 

The banana bread can cool in the pan.  When it is cool cut in half lengthwise and then into slices and place into a gallon sized ziploc bag.  The ziploc bag can go into the cooler during the day to keep the chocolate chips from melting everywhere.  Half a loaf is perfect for one person for a four day festival.  The other half can be frozen and eaten the week after you get home. 

Lentil Soup

Lentil soup is so satisfying, it’s easy to make, good for you and delicious.  The easy to make part is really where it’s at because you can pull together a hearty satisfying pot of soup in no time at all. It also freezes well.  I grew up on my Mom’s lentil soup which she usually made with Italian sausages, everything’s better with some Italian sausage.  I usually cook it vegetarian style but will occasionally bust out Mom’s version since as mentioned everything really is better with Italian sausage.

I make this so often that I don’t usually bother with a recipe but here’s the gist of it. 

2 Tablespoons Olive oil
1/2 onion, diced
2 carrots, sliced into rounds
2 cloves garlic, chopped

3 cups stock
1 can chopped tomatoes, 15.5 oz
1 cup lentils
1 Bay leaf
½ tsp Cumin
¼ tsp cayenne

Salt & pepper
2-3 cups Spinach, torn or shredded

In a medium sized soup pot warm olive oil, add onion and carrot and cook over med heat until softened.  Add garlic and sauté another 30 seconds-1 minute until garlic is fragrant.

Add stock, tomatoes, lentils, bay leaf, cumin and cayenne.  Allow to boil for about 2 minutes and then reduce heat to low and cook for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes start checking your lentils, they will probably need another 5-10 minutes to reach your desired tenderness. 

Once done to your preference, add salt and pepper and torn spinach.  Cook for a few minutes more, until spinach has wilted and serve.

Serve with warmed up pita and a dollop of yogurt top with chopped parsley or cilantro if you have it. 

Sausage version:

Replace olive oil with ½ pound of sweet Italian sausage

Cook sausage in soup pot until cooked through

Remove from pan and slice into sausage coins or bite sized chunks

Add onion and carrot and cook over med heat until softened.

Follow recipe above from this point on

Notes

Stock: You can use any kind of stock, I usually use chicken because that is what I have around but if you want it to be vegetarian you can use vegetable stock.

Lentils:  Use green or brown. If you want to use red lentils combine them with green or brown lentils otherwise you end up with a mushy soup.  The red (or orange?) lentils fall apart after cooking and you end up with a more pureed type of soup. 

Spices:  You can use any spices you like in lentil soup.  I have settled on the cumin/cayenne combo above but you can give it a more Indian flavor with curry powder or ground coriander and turmeric.  I will add chopped cilantro or parsley if I have them around. 

Red Beans & Rice (not authentic)

This is a recipe I have been tweaking for ages.  I started out with a version that fed about 25 it would end with me days later trying to separate the chunks of sausage from the rice.  Throwing away perfectly good rice is wasteful, throwing away sausage?  That’s sacrilege. Since then I have been working it down to a manageable size for one person.  In the process I discovered I like my vegetables chopped fine, and the sausage chopped small so I can get one or two pieces in each bite.  I also decided I liked the rice cooked in with the red beans ala Zatarains boxed red beans and rice. 

Here is the recipe for one:

½ med yellow onion diced

1 celery stalk chopped small
½ green bell pepper diced
1 jalepeno diced
1 garlic clove chopped
15.5 oz can red beans
2.5 cups stock

½ cup white rice

Bay leaf
Hot sauce, I like Crystal for this
½ lb andouille sausage diced into small pieces about the size of your thumbnail

1. Saute onion, celery and peppers over med heat until soft, about 10 minutes. 

2. Add garlic sauté for another minute or 30 seconds until garlic is fragrant.

3. Add drained beans, broth, rice, bay leaf and hot sauce.  Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

4. Add sausage in last ten minutes.

5. After 20 minutes test rice.  If it’s done, remove from heat and enjoy with some more dashes of hot sauce.

This is still a work in progress; so far the rice cooked in with the beans works for me.  The negative is that the beans can end up overcooked.  The next time I make it I will try adding the beans and the sausage in the last ten minutes.