Les Bonnes Choses

I've been listening to NPR news for the last 2 hours while I worked away in the kitchen, so it was hard to avoid writing such a topical title.

I've picked up a new hobby in the last month or so: running everything in the produce aisle through Lola's (my mother-in-law) abandoned juicer. I had seen a documentary (or perhaps it was a very cleverly-done infomercial) featuring some Aussie driving around the United States on a 60-day juice-only diet. Surely you've experienced television-induced food cravings? I think that's what happened. Good thing I wasn't watching Supersize Me. Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The next weekend when I was visiting, Lola happened to mention she was planning on getting rid of her juicer, virtually unused because of the trouble required to clean it. Within the week, I was running all kinds of crap through that thing.

I like to go to the Oakton Market for groceries --especially produce -- because it's a very atypical grocery store (and much cheaper than the local grocery store). For one thing, the produce area occupies about a third of the store, and it has all kinds of random stuff you don't see elsewhere. This is related to the other characteristic I find interesting: the interior aisles are are basically organized by ethnicity. Greeks and Russians look on different shelves (and likely different aisles) to find something to spread on toast. The dedication to serving diverse ethnicities means that more obscure foodstuffs are a little more prominent. I don't know how I'd prepare a sheep's head, but I know where to get one. The last time I was there, loading up my cart with produce to run through the juicer, I bought some ground lamb (which I've seen at more conventional grocery stores, but can be harder to find). It was an impulse buy. I don't know if it's necessarily healthier than ground beef, but it seemed like an interesting change of pace. That left me with a problem of cooking it in such a way that didn't mask it.

John suggested shepherd's pie, in which North Americans normally use ground beef, which as he pointed out, doesn't make a damn bit of sense: It's called shepherd's pie, not cowherder's pie. This brings me back to the juicer, which you probably thought was a very convoluted and unnecessary way to introduce the grocery store until this point. When you run stuff through the juicer, you get juice (obviously), and the pulp, from which the juice is separated. The juice you drink, but what do you do with the pulp? I hate wasting stuff. Some types of pulp lend themselves well with recipes: Juice a carrot and use the pulp for carrot cake. Peel and core an apple before you juice it and you're left with applesauce. This evening I decided the leftover beet, tomato, carrot and celery pulp would work well in my shepherd's pie along with some peas and corn. To be extra different, I topped my shepherd's pie with mashed potato/celery root which I cooked in the inaugural use of my new pressure cooker.

I won't go to the trouble of posting a recipe because vegetable pulp from a juicer requires some kitchen equipment that people don't really need (mine was free, after all), nor is mechanical mastication critical to the success of the meal. But if I may provide a quick sketch of a tasty shepherd's pie: 500g of lamb, browned in a skillet with ground rosemary, black pepper and salt, to which you add in a square casserole pan diced (or even splattered) vegetables such as carrots, beets, peas and corn, and which you top with a creamy mash of potatoes and possibly other white mashable vegetables such as celery root, turnip, parsnip or cauliflower. It was tasty, and having a wide assortment of vegetables probably makes it a good way to hit your vitamin quota across the board.