You Say Bruschetta, I Say Crostini

A while ago, I went to a class at this chocolate store in the Village (which I won’t name, because I don’t have the best things to say about it) that was supposed to include a session of make-your-own-bark, i.e. pick some dried fruit & nuts, pour melted chocolate over them, let it harden, and voila! Bark! That you get to take home! It did not exactly play out that way, though. Instead, there was a wine tasting, with chocolate pairings, and a cooking demonstration, all of which was very pleasant. And the class cost me a grand total of $10, so I really had nothing to bitch about.

Only here’s the thing: they tried to pass off celery as rhubarb in the recipe they made. Now, I do not have the finest palate of anyone I know (hi, dad!), but I can tell the difference between celery and rhubarb, even when it’s been stewed with jalapeño, shallot, cider vinegar, and chocolate. Admittedly, the staff at this particular store didn’t even know if their pre-made bark contained sweet or sour cherries, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. And maybe I should retract the earlier statement about not bitching…

In any case, shortly after this class, we got a little bunch of rhubarb in the box.

It was not enough to make a pie, and the fruit share hadn’t started yet so I couldn’t do a combination rhubarb/berry thing, so I decided to stick it in the freezer until such time as I might be able to make the ACTUAL recipe, which they’d nicely given us on glossy printed cards. And that time finally arrived Wednesday night, when I., K., and M. came over for dinner. 

So the first step, aside from defrosting the rhubarb, is to caramelize some onion (I had a cippolini on hand, though the recipe calls for shallot) and minced garlic in a butter/olive oil mix.

This needs to be on a lower flame than you think, or it’ll just get all crispy, which isn’t really a BAD thing but isn’t what I was really going for.

Then, you toss in the rhubarb (diced), a bit of jalapeño (ditto), a bit of minced ginger, a tablespoon of brown sugar, and a little apple cider vinegar. Let all that stew together until it seems like a relish kind of consistency.

Add some cocoa nibs, and shaved baking chocolate, salt & pepper to taste, and you’re done. 

Or mostly done.  Last steps involve toasting some bread with olive oil,

spreading on some goat cheese, and adding a dollop of relish on top of each little crostini. 

And yeah, as witnessed with mole poblano, savory things made with chocolate are often very ugly (but good). Bruto ma buono, as the saying goes.

If you make this, an interesting game is to have your dining companions try to guess what’s in the relish.

Chocolate-Rhubarb Relish
enough for 15-20 crostini

1/2 tsp olive oil
1 tsp butter
1 shallot or small onion, sliced thin
1 small garlic clove, minced
3/4 c rhubarb, diced
1 small jalapeño, diced
1/2 tsp ginger, minced
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp cocoa nibs
2 tsp shaved unsweetened chocolate
salt & pepper

baguette, cut into 1/4″-thick slices
olive oil for brushing
2 oz goat cheese

Heat a small heavy saucepan over medium-low heat with the butter and olive oil. When it’s melted, add the onion and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until they start to caramelize a bit, 10 minutes or so. Add the rhubarb, jalapeño, ginger, vinegar, and sugar. Cook about another 5 minutes, until everything has come together in a relish-y kind of way. (You don’t want the pepper to be raw, is sort of the point. The rhubarb will take care of itself.) Taste and season as needed with salt & pepper.
The relish can be made ahead of time and stored in the fridge for a day.
When you’re ready to assemble, brush the slices of bread with olive oil, sprinkle with more salt & pepper, and toast (the broiler works for this, if you’re good at keeping an eye on things and not letting them burn; otherwise a 375F oven for 10-15 minutes). When they’re nicely browned, spread each piece with a layer of goat cheese and top with a spoonful of the relish. If you’re inclined, garnish with some more chocolate shavings.

Theories & Experiments

I have this theory that if I go more than a week or so without having people over for dinner, I start to get all twitchy. But it’s hard to test, because generally, I don’t go more than a week without having a dinner party of some kind. Sometimes it’s a big fancy to do, with 8 people and multiple courses, but more often it’s just a simple dinner with, for example, two dear friends whom I’ve known since we were born. 

M. and R. were having a pretty rough week for reasons I don’t need to share, and it was a chilly, rainy, March-like day on Tuesday. So the comfort of a roast chicken seemed the way to go. I had picked up a bunch of radishes in the greenmarket on Monday, and I’ve been reading about roasted radishes everywhere this month, so I thought I’d give that a try. And for dessert, the plan was one of my typical missions, responding to a challenge to make red velvet cupcakes, but since I’m me, I needed to find an alternative to red food dye.  So there’s your menu.

And now a brief aside: someone, years ago, presented to me the pyramid theory of relationships. According to this theory, there is one person in the world, one in 6+ billion (what’s the count these days?), who is essentially your soul mate. And if you should be so lucky to find this person, the capstone of your pyramid as it were, you would be so blissfully happy that you wouldn’t even know what to do with yourself. But then, there are a small handful of people (the next level of the pyramid) where, if you found any of them, you would be such an incredibly happy couple that you’d think you had found that first person, the capstone. And so on down the levels, with more and more people fitting each decreasing level of happiness (I visualize the world’s population all standing on each other’s shoulders). The trick, of course, is that you don’t ever really know where someone is on your pyramid, so you never really know if there’s someone out there better suited to you. (The other trick is that most people are not on the same level of each other’s pyramids.)

Anyway. I’m not sure how deeply I buy into this theory, but it has stuck with me for many years. And the thing is, I have no idea who originally presented it to me. None. I’ve asked around and no one is taking ownership. This method of roasting a chicken is similar (see? I had a point in telling that story), in that I no longer remember where I read about lining the roasting pan with slices of bread and sticking the chicken on top.

But in this case, I can attest with certainty that it is a brilliant idea. Stuff the chicken with something flavorful (a lemon sliced in 2, a few cloves of garlic, some fresh herbs), season it with salt & pepper and drizzle with olive oil, and pour a good amount of olive oil on the bread, too. Shove some of the fresh herbs under the skin of the chicken, too, if you like. And what you wind up with is something like deconstructed stuffing. Or (as M. suggested makes more sense) un-reconstructed stuffing. Either way, an hour at 400F later, it’s amazingly good. The bread will get a little singed, probably, but it doesn’t really matter. Also there is no basting, because all the juices that you’d normally use for that get soaked up by the not-stuffing. And if by some chance you don’t eat all the bread at dinner, chop it up as croutons the next day for the best salad you’ve ever had.

(It should be noted that R. served as my staff photographer for most of the night, which is a good thing for several reasons. One, I often forget about the camera altogether when I’m cooking, which makes blogging about meals kind of tricky. Two, he has an excellent eye, even with my little point-and-shoot.)

Now let’s move on to the radishes. I had used the greens for dinner for myself on Monday, in a stir-fried rice inspired by a recipe from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (more on this book later–Farmer John runs a CSA somewhere in Illinois and on the cover of the book he is wearing a bright orange feather boa, which should be enough to make you want to buy the book right now). But that left the plump jewel-like radishes themselves. Leite’s Culinaria (a blog you should read if you don’t) offered up a recipe from Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that seemed designed for this dinner.

Clean the radishes, leaving on a little nub of the greens, and if there are any that are ginormous, cut them in half. Toss them in something oven-proof with a bit of olive oil, a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and some thyme (yay windowbox!), and roast at 400F for the last 10-15 minutes that the chicken is cooking. And you’re done.

Then came the tricky bit: dessert. I love dessert, and I love to bake, but I’m a better, more confident cook than baker. I have mentioned, perhaps, that I’ve been bringing in the extras from recent baking experiments to the dojo where I practice aikido. This makes everybody happy, because it means I don’t wind up eating an entire loaf of banana bread myself (with the justification that it would otherwise go stale), and the uchi deshi, who spend 32 hours a week training, and are therefore perpetually hungry, get homebaked whatever-the-hell-I-felt-compelled-to-make-that-week.

Last week, when I asked one of the other members if he had any requests, he said, without so much as pausing to take a breath, “red velvet cupcakes.” And initially, I said, “um, no, that’s not really my thing.” But then I thought about it, and realized that it’s mostly not my thing because of the food dye (standard recipes call for 2 entire bottles of red dye in a batch of cupcakes). So I started hunting around for alternative, natural recipes. And pureed beets seems to be the thing to do.

I started with a recipe from Beauty Everyday, but thanks to the keen eye of M., who is a much more experienced baker than I am, we made some substantial alterations. She suggested cutting down on the sugar and the eggs, and also realized that the volume of icing was totally out of proportion with the amount of cake we’d be making. So I wisely stepped aside and let her take the culinary reins.

After the last step of folding in the pureed beets, we concluded that the batter was sufficiently cake-like to proceed. So into the muffin tin went this beautiful, almost magenta mix.

And we crossed our fingers for 17 minutes as we sat down to dinner.

But it turns out we needn’t have been so worried. The recipe was a hit (though it occurs to me that if you slather cream cheese icing on cardboard, it would be declared a success). The comparison we came up with is that it’s like carrot cake, just with beets, and chocolate flavored instead of spiced.

And most importantly, the cake is indeed red!

Final side note: I learned in my search for this recipe that originally, the color in red velvet cake came from a reaction between the cocoa powder and the acid of the buttermilk. It wasn’t a super bright red, more like brick or rust. But then cocoa powder began being manufactured using a process called “dutching,” which serves to stabilize it but also changes the pH so much that the reaction couldn’t happen. And by that time, red food dye (a.k.a. cancer juice) was widely available. And then there was no going back, because Americans for some reason like their food to be as brightly colored as possible.

Ok, class dismissed.