There was a time when I cooked bulgur several times a month.  The par-boiled and ground wheat was cheap, filling, and a great base for one-pot meals with vegetables and chicken.

I loved the mild, nutty flavor and nicely chewy texture.  But bulgur slipped out of my repertoire when I began experimenting more in the kitchen and homey pilafs gave way to sophisticated risottos.

This winter, though, I’ve rediscovered the simple pleasures of the quick-cooking grain in my quest to put more whole grains on our plates.  Prepared in the style of a risotto with mushrooms, butternut squash and spinach, it makes a terrific entree for Meatless Monday or a side dish for grilled meat.

Bulgur is a staple in the Middle East and  may well have been the first convenience food.   Archaeologists date the cereal back at least as far as Bulgaria in 5900 BC,  where it was pre-cooked and dried before being ground, much as it is today.

You may have eaten it in tabouleh or kibbeh, the meatballs popular throughout Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.  It retains most of its nutrients and is a far better source of protein and fiber than brown rice  Look for it in the bulk bins of natural foods stores or in the supermarket cereal aisle alongside the steel-cut oats and seven-grain blends.

Unlike many whole grains, bulgur cooks in 20 minutes or less.  It can be soaked in boiling water or simmered in chicken broth.  Vegetable broth is a good alternative but makes for a slightly sweeter dish.

I give the grain a risotto treatment — minus the constant stirring — in this pilaf of winter vegetables.  Half a cup of dry white wine, stirred in after the bulgur cooks for a few minutes, makes all the difference in the finished dish.  Baby spinach is added in the last five minutes for the nutritional blessings of greens without all the prep work of kale and chard.

Bulgur has earned a prominent place in my pantry once again.

California olive oil has held a place of honor in my pantry ever since I attended my first olive oil tasting in 2006 and discovered an emerging community of producers in the Golden State.  It’s a key  ingredient in this great quinoa, pistachio and cherry salad, which I’ll get to later.

Five years ago, the best-known California oils were produced by small growers raising Tuscan varieties for artisanal oils with high prices.   I saved them for special dishes and salad dressings.  For everyday cooking, I still relied on supermarket brands of extra virgin oils from Italy.

That changed when I tasted my first mass produced oil from a large California grower that uses modern methods of harvesting and pressing. Here was a fruity, fresh tasting oil at a price low enough for everyday use.  Imported oils were banished from my shelves.  Most probably don’t meet strict international standards for extra virgin oil, anyway, according to a University of California, Davis study released last year.

My olive oil education took another step forward last week, when I was invited to experience the harvest at California Olive Ranch in Artois, nearly 100 miles north of the state capital in the heart of the Sacramento Valley.  The Ranch was a pioneer in the U.S. when it planted its first high-density orchards of semi-dwarf olive trees on 75 acres near Oroville in 1999.  It followed a modern Spanish model for planting trees along trellises and harvesting them mechanically, similar to the way wine grapes are handled.

Today, the company is the biggest olive oil producer in the nation and its moderately-priced oils are sold in supermarkets and specialty grocers from coast to coast.  It grows Spanish and Greek varieties of olives on three ranches with a total of 5,000 acres in addition to contracting with other farmers for fruit grown on more than 5,000 acres.  Its olives go from tree to extra virgin oil in a few hours, thanks to high tech mills. Every truckload is tracked from ranch to bottle.

I jumped at the opportunity to tour the orchards and see those mechanical harvesters in action — not to mention taste oil fresh off the tree.  The harvest starts in early October, when the olives begin to hit their peak oil content, and continues into November most years.

From a distance, the Artois orchard looks like rows of neatly trimmed hedges stretching toward the horizon.  Only when you get closer is it apparent that the hedges are actually closely planted trees, their tops trimmed flat at about seven feet tall, arranged in rows about five feet apart. Some 650 trees are planted per acre compared with 125 in traditional planting patterns.

Ungainly yellow harvesters, looking for all the world like sheds on wheels, roll up and down the rows at the pace of a brisk walker.  As they pass over the rows, the machines squeeze and shake the trees, harvesting all but a few olives without breaking the branches.

As a treat, ranch manager Adam Englehardt offered five other bloggers and me a chance to ride on one of the harvesters.  It was noisy, dusty and great fun to watch the olives collect in bins then move up a conveyor belt to be dumped in a trailer traveling alongside in the next row.

“It’s still a pretty new technology and it’s still being refined,” says Englehardt, who notes that only three varieties are suitable for this process now.  They’re the Spanish Arbequina and Arbosana varieties and the Greek Koroneiki.

Once they’re picked, the olives are rushed to the nearby mill, where they’re washed, sorted and pressed.  The oil emerges from the press in a brilliant green stream before being piped to 55-foot tall stainless steel tanks, where it settles before bottling.  It’s never filtered.

Much of the oil is blended into the company’s Everyday California Extra Virgin Olive Oil or the Miller’s Blend, which won best of class in the Armonia Olive Oil competition in Italy.  The rest goes into single variety Arbequina or Arbosana oils.

The majority of the olive oil pressed last week won’t see market shelves until next March.  The exception is a small Limited Reserve bottling of new oil—the olio nuovo prized by Italians — that will be shipped later this month.   In our tasting, the new Arbequina oil was grassy and fresh with a nicely aggressive pungency — that tingling sensation you sometimes get at the back of the throat when you taste extra virgin oil straight up.  If you’d like to try it, you can sign up for the waiting list.

My favorite of the standard bottles is the Arbosana, a complex oil with citrus undertones and a peppery kick.  It was perfect for the salad, pictured above, that I was tipped to by Kirsten Wanket, the California Olive Ranch’s marketing manager.

The recipe comes from Fran Gage’s “The New American Olive Oil” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2009) and it more than lives up to Kirsten’s billing.   Gage toasts the quinoa before cooking, which brings out layers of flavor I’d never before found in the tiny South American grain.  My only change was substituting the dried cherries I had on hand for the dried cranberries in the original.  Both bring a bright, tart note to a salad that only gets better as it sits in the refrigerator for a day or so.

The first granola bar I ever tasted came from a natural foods bakery in Oakland.  It was a tempting combination of chewy bar cookie and enough crunchy whole grains to make me feel virtuous about the indulgence.

I bought them whenever I could until the store that carried them went out of business.  I pined for something similar but no other commercial granola bar has even come close.  Most are hard bricks that taste little better than sawdust and are suited only for emergency rations in my book.

Recently, though, I’ve been working on my own recipe, prompted by a hike with a friend who was working very hard to make her calories count.  Not for her the chocolate chip cookies I usually bring along on hikes, even though they’re loaded with oats and granola, too.

For Sara, I came up with something new — a whole wheat blondie packed with as much good granola as possible without losing the moist, chewy foundation.

Admittedly, this granola bar still has butter and sugar.  (If you’re going to eat baked goods, I say, you should just go for the good stuff and eat less of it.)  But it also contains an extraordinarily generous portion of only lightly sweetened nuts and whole grains as well as dried fruit.

I’ve tweaked the recipe over the course of several hikes with other friends and like this version best.  Top quality granola is essential.  I’ve used homemade granola sweetened with maple syrup, although any good commercial granola will work, too.

The optional chocolate chips are a nice touch but don’t give in to the impulse to increase the quantity.  Too much chocolate changes the character of the bars altogether.

These bars received the seal of approval from a quartet of teenage boys on a backpacking trip to Point Reyes last month.  They devoured them all.  Of course, they also ate everything else in sight.

More to the point, perhaps, the adults hikers gave them their vote, too.

Hummus often is the easiest dish to skip at a party.  It’s that creamy beige dip in a plastic tub that someone picked up at the store on the way to the host’s house.  It’s pleasant enough if the processor hasn’t used too much citric acid as a preservative but hardly worth the calories when there are more exciting choices on the table.

At least that’s what I always thought until I was coaxed into sampling the garlicky hummus offered at a farmers market in Santa Clara.  Who knew that such a silky, seductive dip could come from pureed chickpeas laced with mellow garlic and spices?  I was hooked.

I knew I had to make my own if I were to satisfy my cravings, though.  And canned chickpeas — better known on the West Coast as garbanzos — just wouldn’t do, even if I slipped off the skins for a smoother puree as many cooks advise.  Besides, dried chickpeas are quite cheap in the bulk bins and aren’t that difficult to prepare, given a little advance planning.

I made a couple versions of hummus soon after I acquired a VitaMix blender this summer, but they weren’t quite right.  One was too bland, the other too watery. So when I was invited to a party thrown by food-loving friends last weekend, I decided to try again to come up with a new variation that could hold it’s own against all the tempting cheeses and hors d’oeuvre I knew would crowd the appetizer table.

Photo by Charlie McCollum

Starting with a basic recipe from the Greek cookbook, “The Olive and the Caper,” by Susanna Hoffman (Workman, 2004), I began pumping up the flavor.  Garlic was roasted for nuttier flavor and so was the sesame paste, known as tahini.  I increased the lemon  juice, cumin and coriander seeds and reduced the water.

The result was an exceptionally smooth and almost buttery puree with a hint of lemon and savory undertones of garlic and spice.  It was light, flavorful and almost irresistible.  I kept finding excuses to dip a spoon into the bowl to check the seasonings.

It was a hit at the party, too, though the home baked pita sprinkled with zatar certainly helped.  (Zatar is a wild thyme-based spice mix sold at Middle Eastern markets or online at Penzey’s Spices.  Alternatively, you can make a fair approximation at home from the recipe below.)

The pita looks impressive and tastes far better than any store-bought flat bread, but it’s really not hard to make.  Just divide any basic bread dough — the whole wheat pizza dough from Trader Joe’s works well —  into balls about 2 inches in diameter. Flatten the balls, then roll out to ¼ inch or thinner. (I use a tortilla press to speed things up.)  Brush each circle of dough lightly with water, sprinkle with zatar, and bake on a pizza stone for 5 minutes or so at 475 degrees.

Serve this at your next party and no one will pass over the hummus.

The last time my father cooked for me, he made his trademark cheese grits for breakfast while I packed for the train.

He was 86, his health was failing, and he didn’t cook much anymore.  His freezer was packed with Hungry Man frozen dinners and my brother and I later found a dozen boxes of Pop Tarts in his pantry.  But he was always  the consummate host and he knew an appetite for grits was the one of the things that we still shared even if he did use quick grits and Cheese Whiz.

They came to the table with steam still rising from the bowls, the grits the texture of velvet from long cooking and fresh garlic masking the processed cheese.  We ate them slowly and talked about the trip ahead.  Then Dad gave me a big hug and drove me down the hill to catch the bus to the train.

I didn’t realize it was the last meal we would ever share.

He was in a coma when I arrived a month later and would die four days later.  I loved him more than I knew and miss him every day.

Now, whenever I eat grits, I think of Dad.   So it seems fitting to make these baked grits for the reception following his memorial service in a couple of weeks even though grits are misunderstood by so many people.

I will explain that grits are one of the few foods from his impoverished childhood that Dad ate with pleasure.  They were a comforting taste of home.

Then I’ll coax guests into trying them by describing them as American polenta. It’s all true.

The name grits is thought to come from grytte, the Old English word for bran.   At one time, Southerners called their breakfast porridge hominy grits for the process by which the kernels were soaked in lye and the hulls removed before the corn was dried and ground. Today, though, most grits are made from whole dried corn, usually a white variety. For more information, check out this article I wrote for the Mercury News.

The best grits are made with stoneground corn and retain the germ that carries the corn flavor. They must be stored in the refrigerator or freezer, unlike the shelf-stable quick variety from which the germ has been removed. I like the whole heart grits from Adams Milling Company in Alabama.  They cook up soft and creamy with a slightly chewy texture and serve as the perfect backdrop for cheese, garlic or the spicy shrimp that have become so popular in restaurants.

Perhaps the most revered artisan grits producer, though, is Anson Mills in South Carolina, which ships its corn to chefs and grits connoisseurs all over the country.   In a pinch, you can use Bob’s Red Mill’s corn grits, which are available in many supermarkets. They’re yellow and also labeled as polenta to appeal to a wider audience, but they’re stoneground and made from the whole grain.

This recipe is my version of a classic Southern casserole.  I was pleased to see that Virginia Willis calls a very similar dish “Funeral Grits” in her wonderful Southern cookbook, “Bon Appetit, Y’All” (Ten Speed Press, 2008).  She notes that it’s “the perfect dish to take to the bereaved after the funeral” since it can be treated as a side dish, holds up for several hours in a low oven, and reheats well as leftovers.

This souffle-like casserole is more involved than my Dad’s simple grits and cheese. It has a lighter texture from the eggs baked into the dish.  I’ve added a little jalapeño, too, to give it a bit more zip.  Still, I’m sure Dad would have liked it.

Grits and cheese in most any form comfort the soul. Whenever I eat them, I think of the poor Oklahoma country boy who worked his way up to a university professorship but still kept his simple tastes.

Dad, this dish is for you.

I had been meaning to make Irish soda bread in honor of St. Patrick this week when an offhand note in the recipe sent me off in a new direction.

In the introduction to his Irish soda bread recipe in “Home Baking” (Artisan, 2003), food writer and world traveler Jeffrey Alford mentions making scones at the impromptu boarding house he once ran in Ireland. The buns sounded like much more fun than the traditional loaf. There’s nothing I like better than scones for breakfast and these were packed with whole grains.

They come together quickly and cook much faster than loaves, too. While you’re still waiting for a loaf to come out of the oven, you could be munching on a hot scone slathered in melting butter. Add a little jam and life is very good, indeed.

Alford offered no instructions for making the scones, aside from adding a little extra sweetener to the dough.  So I had to wing it.  First, I cut the recipe by a third to make a more manageable batch.  Then I cut the salt, increased the sugar, substituted buttermilk for the soured milk, and added a cup of plump currants.  I glazed them with an egg wash, sprinkled a little more sugar over the top and popped them into the oven.

The resulting scones were substantial but flaky and tender — unlike the rocks passed off as scones at coffee shops across America.  With whole wheat and oatmeal, they offered more flavor and texture, too.  (I used whole wheat pastry flour because I had some on hand, but Alford calls for regular whole wheat.)  With butter, they were heavenly.

The little bit of oatmeal seems to keep them moist longer than usual, too.  They were still quite good the next day.

Although I like these scones slightly sweet for breakfast, a savory variation would be good for supper as well.  If you’d like to serve some with your corned beef and cabbage on St. Paddy’s Day, just cut the sugar down to 2 tablespoons and leave out the currants.  Skip the dusting of sugar on top, too.

Of course, you could just make it into a loaf and bake it for about an hour.  But I’ll stick to the scones and thank the Irish for one of the simple pleasures in life.

Meet my new favorite cookie.

I know, I’m a fickle cookie lover, easily distracted by the latest flavor sensation.  I’ve rarely met a homemade cookie I didn’t like.

But this combination of toffee and chocolate chips has my number.  It’s chewy and nutty at the center with crisp edges and the buttery flavor of toffee playing off  bittersweet chocolate chips. One just leads to another and another and…..

It all began with a cookie I spotted at the bakery counter at the local Whole Foods.  I was intrigued by the idea of a toffee cookie and the one I bought was pretty good.  But it was too sweet on balance and far too cakey for my taste.  I knew it could be much better with a few tweaks.

I started with a standard chocolate chip cookie batter and began playing around.  First I needed to find the toffee and, although I’ve read that toffee chips are available in markets, I couldn’t find any where I live.  So I settled on toffee candy bars — Skor brand were the best — and chopped them up myself.

I tweaked the proportions of ingredients, cutting the total amount of sweetener and shifting the balance from granulated to brown sugar for deeper flavor.  I added sea salt and doubled the vanilla.  Then I let the dough rest overnight in the refrigerator to allow it to hydrate.

The biggest change, though, was a switch from all purpose white to whole wheat pastry flour inspired by Alice Medrich’s incredible cookbook, “Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies” (Artisan, 2010).  Alice is a wizard and her whole wheat chocolate chip cookies are so good that no one would ever compare them to dowdy health food store cookies.

The key is the pastry flour, which is softer and contains less protein than regular whole wheat flour.  It produces a tender cookie with a nicely nutty flavor set off by a generous portion of toasted walnuts.

I’ve been baking these cookies all winter.  The story I tell is that I need to test the recipe one more time to make sure it’s right.  But I’m not fooling anyone.  I’m hooked.

I hope you love them, too.

Once upon a time, bran muffins were considered health food.  That was before food processors got their hands on them and muffins became overblown monuments to excess — loaded with fat and sugar, wrapped in cellophane and sold in every convenience store and coffee shop.  Now a single bran muffin from a commercial oven easily can top 400 calories.

The problem, of course is that the earlier bran muffins were hard to swallow. All that fiber-rich bran has the texture and flavor of sawdust and needs to be lightened up before it’s palatable to most eaters.  Sugar and fat are the simplest solutions.  But not the only ones.

These updated muffins are the best of both eras, moist and tasty but not too sweet or rich.  The secret is in yogurt and honey, which improve the texture and boost flavor.

I was looking for a healthful breakfast option earlier this month when I recalled the bran muffins I used to bake from a refrigerated batter.  The recipe for “Super-Natural Bran Muffins” came from a tattered copy of the “The California Heritage Cookbook,” by the Junior League of Pasadena (Doubleday, 1976), now out of print.

The concept was great.  Whole grains, vegetable oil, and unrefined sugars were stirred together in a fairly wet batter that was stored in the refrigerator for up to four weeks, allowing the cook to bake off however many muffins were desired at a time.  It was perfect for cooks who like  to serve freshly baked breads for breakfast but can’t get it together to make the batter first thing in the morning.

Still, it needed a drastic makeover to suit current tastes.  The ingredient list included processed bran cereal such as All-Bran and way too much sugar.

The 2011 version uses unprocessed bran, less than half as much sugar as the original and substitutes a combination of yogurt and milk for the buttermilk, which can be hard to find in small quantities.  Whole wheat pastry flour replaces regular whole wheat flour for a lighter texture.  Muscovado sugar, a molasses-rich unrefined cane sugar available in many natural foods stores, takes the place of ordinary brown sugar.  I also like to use sunflower oil instead of generic vegetable oil because I prefer the flavor, although canola will suffice.

To make the muffins more interesting, I’ve added dates and walnuts.  You can use any kind of dried fruit in place of the dates, but I recommend sticking with the walnuts.  Although they bump up the calorie count, walnuts contribute important Omega 3 fats, antioxidants and great crunch.

The basic muffin racks up 181 calories according to the calculator at caloriecount.about.com.  Fully loaded with dates and walnuts, it jumps to 224 calories.  The muffin is smaller than those coffee shop behemoths but it tastes far better.

These are the wholesome muffins I want in January when I’m recovering from the glorious excesses of the recent holidays.  They’re not only easy to bake when I want them — they’re easy on my conscience.

A perfectly ripe pear is a joy unto itself, requiring little more than a bit of cheese and a handful of nuts to make a memorable dessert.

Sadly, I haven’t encountered many perfect pears.

The pears of my experience tend to be hard as rocks at the market, only to bruise and scar in the bag on the trip home, then turn to mush almost overnight on the kitchen counter.  Sometime in between, I know there is a point when they’re just right, the flesh still slightly firm, the sweet juices flowing freely.  But I miss it more often than not.

Still, I can’t resist the promise of pears.  Every fall, I find myself buying gorgeous pears at the peak of the season in the hope I can catch a few at the elusive moment of perfection.  It’s a good thing I have this cake as Plan B for the fruit that doesn’t measure up. It’s especially good with Bosc pears.

Moist and spicy with the subtle flavor of pear and the crunch of walnuts, this is just the cake I want for holiday brunches and buffets.  Although it has plenty of sugar and fat, it feels like a healthful option compared to most holiday sweets.

The recipe is inspired by a fresh apple cake I found while browsing through a three-decade-old James Beard cookbook, “The New James Beard” (Knopf, 1981).  I’ve updated it by reducing the oil, shifting the balance of spices, introducing whole wheat pastry flour and eliminating the final glaze.  The result is a cake with a dense crumb and a wonderfully crisp and crusty top.

In keeping with its rustic character, this is a fairly simple cake to put together.  Since there’s no butter to cream,  it easily could be stirred together by hand, although I rely on an electric mixer.  The flour, baking soda and spices are whisked together instead of sifted.

I assemble all the ingredients before peeling and chopping the pears since the flesh turns brown so quickly once it’s exposed to the air.

The basic recipe is pretty adaptable.  You could substitute apples, persimmons or frozen blueberries for the pears.  Any neutral vegetable oil will do, too, although I prefer the flavor of sunflower oil.

The next time life hands you imperfect pears, remember, there’s always a cake to bake.

The trouble with writing about seasonal cooking at this time of year is you never know what the weather gods are going to deliver from day to day.

When I started working on this post, temperatures were chilly and the skies overcast.  Nothing seemed more appropriate than this hearty variation on risotto made with mushrooms and an ancient form of wheat Italians know as farro.  By the time I got up this morning, though, temperatures already were in the 60s and the sun was rising in a clear sky.

Still, the forecast is for rain and cold weather again in a couple of days.  Unless you have a well-stocked pantry, it may take that long to round up the essential ingredients for this dish. Not every market carries farro alongside the rice and pasta, although it has become more widely available in recent years.

Nutty in flavor and nicely chewy, farro is one of my favorite whole grains. It makes a tasty change from brown rice and bulgur and cooks about as quickly as white rice.   Semi-perlato farro, with lightly polished grains, still retains some of its nutritious bran and it’s a lot less daunting than wheat berries.

Italians, of course, have devised delectable ways to eat this descendant of wild emmer wheat.  They add it to soups and cook it with broth in a dish they call farrotto.  I first tried it in a recipe from “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook,” by the inspiring chef, Judy Rodgers (W.W. Norton, 2002).  It was so good, I kept going back to it again and again.

This new recipe was born of one of my pre-payday treasure hunts in the pantry.  I wanted something substantial and satisfying for dinner but I was bound and determined not to go to the grocery store again.  I found half a bag of farro, a box of chicken broth, an onion and a package of dried shiitake mushrooms on the shelves.  The carrot and celery were hiding in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator.

This simple farrotto was so good that I decided to introduce fresh mushrooms the next time.  It was even better.

Don’t be deterred by the instructions for adding the broth in increments.  If you keep the temperature low, only sporadic stirring is required to prevent the grains from sticking while they absorb the liquid.  You can do it while you’re setting the table and making a salad.

This is just the dish for cold and rainy fall evenings.  Stock your pantry now and you’ll be ready when they show up again.