A classic CrummyOuting.  I searched Epicurious for rice and miso, and found this recipe.

Unfortunately, I bought my supplies at the suburban Giant on my way home from work.  It’s a huge space but contains almost nothing out of the ordinary, just more varieties of the ordinary.

In particular, the recipe called for baby bok choy.  They had adult bok choy, but no babies (maybe worried about cruelty?).  I dithered around in Produce for maybe 10 minutes, hoping for inspiration, and finally setttled on small endives.  Approximately the same shape as the baby bok choy, not far off in flavor, and arguably in the same phylogenetic order as bok choy, (worst case, in the same phylum).

I didn’t get the value of serving the dish with the huge quartered veggie pieces; I would just as soon have cut them up when finished stir-frying them.  But we quibble.  It was basically quick and tasty, and used up rice and miso.

Sorry no picture.  I thought I took a picture of it, but none was to be found in my phone in the morning.

I bought a buffalo steak (boneless sirloin, if you care) a few weeks ago, and haven’t done anything with it since Debbie declared that it made her “squeamish”.

Everyone’s squeamish about something, so I don’t begrudge her that, but buffalo seems just like lean beef to me, I don’t see it’s worth putting it in the squeamish-generating class.  But that’s me.

Since she found it squeam-o-genic I didn’t do anything about it until Thursday night, when she said, “Why doesn’t the Crummy Cook make something tomorrow night?”

As you can see from the lack of postings, I’ve been pretty idle lately, a consequence of too much travel and nights out with friends or restaurants.

So I said, “what’ve we got in the freezer?”  Debbie rattled off a list of things including the buffalo, and I said, “I’ll make the buffalo, but I’ll also make something else substantial in case you don’t want any of it.”

OK.  I found a Brown- and Wild-Rice Pilaf With Porcini and Parsley recipe in Epicurious that looked pretty tasty (amazingly, there are a bunch of brown- and wild-rice pilaf dishes; lot of people trying to make brown rice interesting).  I thought that would be pretty substantial.

And, just for kicks, I searched for buffalo recipes, and found Buffalo Steak and Onion Confit on Garlic Toasts, which I thought might overwhelm Debbie’s squeamishness.

It all went well (although, inexplicably, the onion confit calls for large pieces of onion, even chunks, which seems a little weird in a confit, but what do I know?).  Debbie and I both loved the pilaf, and the buffalo was pretty good too.  It didn’t quite overcome Debbie’s hesitation, but she finished it and declared she would eat it another time.

Yesterday I expected Debbie home about 8 pm (it turned out to be more like 10, thanks to those lovely weather systems we’re getting more and more of nowadays).

Plus I had the yen to slow cook something.  We have a crockpot from the dawn of time (I think we got it as a wedding present in 1982), and the idea that I’m a crock-pot cook or a slow cook or whatever is deeply appealing to me.

In any case, I had seen a recipe in a magazine I picked up in Whole Foods for slow-cooked lamb shanks, but you had to cook them three different ways in the recipe (brown them, then bake them, then broil them) with various manipulations in between.

The heck with that.  But it fixated me on lamb.  I started looking around in our cookbooks for slow-cooked lamb recipes, and came up with a relatively simple “Neapolitan Lamb Stew” in a book on slow cooking from Ten Speed Press.

Harry, my guest blogger, business partner, and friend, tells me that “Neapolitan” is a code word for “tomato sauce”, and, indeed, this recipe had 2 lbs of tomatoes in there.  But also red wine, rosemary, and boatloads of lamb stew meat.

Recipe ordinaire, I was fretting, but 8 hours of slow cooking in the crockpot turned it into what Joy of Cooking or somebody called a “Heavenly slumgullion” after a while.  It was really good. All the gnarly bits were rendered out of the lamb chunks, the sauce came together, and it was A-1.

On Friday night I did soft-shelled crabs, which I love.  Once Black Salt Fish Market cleaned the crabs (which, the guy told me, was “easy” if you had a scissors) they were pretty easy to prep.  I dipped them in milk, dredged them in panko, and fried them in a mix of butter and oil.  One of the two came out just about perfect, the other was not well-done enough: it would have squeamed out Debbbie but I was able to eat it fine, it wasn’t like raw or anything.

Sorry, no pix.