Frittering Away

The CSA season for Stoneledge is over. Nevertheless one must eat dinner. Capitalism may stop for inclement weather, but I do not. Even as the storm was coming in, a similar one was being cooked up in my kitchen (sorry–some puns are too easy to pass up). While essentially housebound, I had homemade pizza with oven-candied tomatoes, and some molasses-buttermilk muffins from a Deborah Madison recipe, and a few other things, some of which might show up here eventually.

But I was really just waiting to get to the store so I could replenish my parsley & cilantro and make a couple of Ottolenghi recipes I’d been lusting after, the second of which is these leek fritters. The header note on the first recipe (tk) suggested them as an excellent accompaniment, and as always, Yotam knows what he’s talking about. Except that he says you can skip the sauce, which is idiotic, because it is very very easy and so amazingly good. Even if you don’t make the fritters, you should make this sauce. But you should also make the fritters.

All you need for the sauce is a blender (a stick blender would probably be fine). Into it go equal parts Greek yogurt & sour cream, a couple of cloves of garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and lots of parsley and cilantro. 

My only complaint about having the UK edition of Plenty is that so many quantities are done in weights instead of volume. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my kitchen scale but WEIGHING fresh herbs does not seem to be the most efficient way to go about things. Do you have any idea how long it takes to pile up 30 grams of cilantro leaves? Long enough that the scale’s energy-saver mode will kick in and it will turn itself off. But don’t be put off by that. You just need a big handful of parsley, and a bigger one of cilantro. Whiz it all up, and give a taste.

Then onto the fritters. Cut up some leeks into biggish chunks, and clean them (or do it the other way around, though I find that it’s easiest to get them clean after cutting, using a salad spinner). Finely chop some shallot or red onion, and saute in olive oil until everything is soft.  

While they are doing their thing, measure out even MORE parsley, and toss it in a bowl with a sliced hot chili pepper, coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, sugar, & salt. When the leeks & onions are cooked, mix them into the herb/spice mixture and let it cool down some.

Mix together some flour, baking powder, salt, milk, an egg, and a little melted butter. Whisk up an egg white, and when the leek mixture is cool enough, fold it in. Then stir in the flour mixture. And now you are ready to make your beautiful fritters.

4″-5″ across seemed to be about right, frying 2-3 minutes on each side, in olive oil over medium heat. They are surprisingly fluffy, given all the leeks, and they are indeed excellent with the bulghar pilaf pictured below. Just try not to drink the sauce straight from the blender before the fritters are ready.

And although they are certainly best eaten piping hot straight out of the pan, it turns out they heat up quite well in your office’s toaster oven the next day, wrapped in foil.

A New Project

As I’ve mentioned obliquely already, Moody Food and I have both decided to participate in this food blogging project called French Fridays with Dorie, wherein we–along with several hundred other people who like to cook and take pictures and write about it–will jointly work our way through Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours, Dorie Greenspan’s latest brilliant cookbook. Moody Food pays a little closer attention to things like “start dates” and “deadlines” than I do, but luckily they don’t kick you out of the club if you miss a week, so it doesn’t matter that I had no idea this project started LAST week already. I missed making gougeres (though I’ll likely make them on my own at some point, just because–I mean, why WOULDN’T I want to make cheese puffs?) but clued in just in time to make Gerard’s Mustard Tart.

I asked my friend P., who shared this with me, and who is a Genuine French Person, what is the difference between a quiche and a tart, and he did not know. Things that I have made and considered a quiche have always been in a pie plate, and I understand that is not really correct, but I have three pie plates (thanks to Lindsay for 2 of them!) and I don’t know how I lived with fewer, but that made it difficult to justify buying a tart pan. I have learned, though, that Projects (like Cook Club, and French Fridays with Dorie) serve as an excellent justification for buying myself new kitchen tools and exotic ingredients. Like a tart pan, or this fancy pants mustard:

 

which I won’t tell you how much it cost (more than the tart pan), but Moody Food said it was the best, and I saw it at Kalustyan’s, and said, “Ooh, yes, I think I need this.” And lo and behold, a few months later I find myself making this mustard tart, and very glad I had some high quality whole grain mustard on hand.

 

Anyway. Usually I would do my sister’s patented (not really) olive oil crust for a quiche, but I like following directions on occasion, so I did the crust Dorie recommends, which includes an egg, and a bit of sugar, and only a teensy bit of ice water. As always, I was sure there wasn’t enough liquid to make it into a proper dough, and as always, I was proven wrong (with DG looking on through the parchment paper).
 

 

Like any normal pie crust, this gets chilled, and then rolled out.

 

(See, mom? The first mat you bought me was a roul-pat, not a sil-pat. Still very useful, but not for oven use.) And then put in the tart pan, and chilled again. 

 

And then baked, ideally with something used as weights, though she says if it’s cold enough, you don’t need them. She also says that if you use dried beans or rice as the weights, you cannot then cook with them. Because I am ignorant, I did not know this already, and because I hate to waste anything that qualifies as food, I have in fact cooked with beans that I had used as pie weights. If I served them to you, I am sorry. But I happen to own ceramic pie weights, so that won’t happen again.

 

So you bake and cool the crust, and then you chop up some carrots and leeks into sort of thick matchsticks, and steam them with a rosemary sprig.

 

Remember when I discovered this spring, doing the detox, that lining the steamer with fresh herbs is an amazing way to cook fish? Well, I’m a slow learner, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would have the same transformative effect on vegetables. It’s amazing I managed to graduate from college at all, seeing how thick I can be.

 

So you do a little egg/cream mixture, dump in a good amount of mustard, pour that into your par-baked crust, and top it with the veggies. They can go any which way you want, but the picture in the book was so pretty, I decided to be formal (if not as neat as J. would have been) and do them in spokes.

 

One hot oven later, and P. declared this an unqualified success, although he had never heard of a mustard tart before (neither had Dorie’s Parisian friends, it seems).

 

 

And so, my first FFwD adventure comes to a close. I have learned many things already, beyond just the recipe for a delicious quiche. (It’s made of egg, it’s in a crust, it’s round. You can call it a tart, and I can call it a quiche.) The project has already proven worth the price of admission, which was really just the cost of the book, which I wanted anyway. In fitting with the community aspect of this project, and on the chance that some other participants meander over to my little blog, here are my answers to a little “getting to know you” questionnaire the organizer put on the site for people to fill out. (And apologies if you all now also have The King and I stuck in your head.)

 

Name: Lexi Beach

Hometown: Bryn Mawr, PA

Current town: New York, NY

How you pay the bills: A funny little niche of book publishing.

How many in your household? Just me and my frequent dinner guests.

What is your favorite comfort food? It’s the cooking that’s my comfort. But I have been known to indulge in yogurt-covered raisins.

The best restaurant you have ever been to? (and what did you have?) Blue Hill (the one in Manhattan, not at Stone Barns). We had the tasting menu, with the wine pairings, which might help explain why I just about fell out of my chair upon tasting the basil ice cream.

Worst habit or vice? Biting my nails (which I can’t do while I’m cooking, so all the more reason to spend lots of time at the stove).

What is your mother’s best dish? Lasagne.

What is your motto? It all works out in the end.

Which kitchen gadget do you use the most? The Cuisinart. Couldn’t survive a week without it.

Noodles and Dumplings

I have somehow become the webmaster of sorts for my CSA’s location, meaning I created a WordPress site where I post the week’s delivery and the (always lovely) note from the farmer. The site also serves as a place for members to share recipes, which, since nobody has suggested a better way to organize them, are categorized by main ingredient, with a page for each vegetable we receive. We’ve gotten scallions three out of the last four weeks, and at first, I didn’t think a page for scallions was necessary, because aside from scallion pancakes, what are you really going to make that features that ingredient? Scallions are a garnish, an accent, or even a substitute for another member of the lily family when you’re out of onion or chives. They are nothing to get excited about.

Or that’s what I thought until I wound up with three large-ish bunches of the things in my fridge, and was planning dinner for I., K., M., and myself. The question “How can I use these things up?” led to a quick Google search, which led to David Chang’s patented ginger-scallion noodles. I have eaten at several of the Momofuku restaurants, and I confess that I find nearly everything Chang does fascinating, brilliant, and (most importantly) delicious. And since I also had a couple of cucumbers begging to be eaten, this was a no-brainer.

To start: scallions. Lots of them.

Slice them up, very thin, using the entire length of the scallion. (I frankly don’t understand recipes that call for the whites only, or even only half the greens. It seems wasteful.) You will need 2 1/2 cups.

Mix in 1/2 cup of minced ginger, 1/4 cup of some neutral oil (grapeseed or whatever), 1 1/2 tsp soy sauce, 3/4 tsp sherry vinegar, and 3/4 tsp salt. Toss it all together and let it marinate for at least 20 minutes.

When I waved the bowl under M.’s nose so she could get a hint of what we’d be eating, she responded, “It smells like dreams,” which is now the standard I aim for with every recipe I make.

Toss the sauce with the noodles (soba in this case, though I’m still not sure I know how to cook them properly–the texture never seems to come out right) and there you go.

Meanwhile have your friend I. slice up the cucumbers on your mandoline and toss them with a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt (more or less, as you see fit; the suggestion is a 3:1 sugar: salt ratio, but the actual amount is to taste). These also need to sit for 20 minutes before you serve them.

And the last step is to find a vegetable you like and pan sear it in a little oil. I believe the official cookbook calls for cauliflower, but it is high summer squash season, so that is what we used. And M. did a yeoman’s job of manning the skillet.

She was also instrumental in cooking the dumplings (stuffed with ground pork and sliced leeks mixed with a little soy sauce and sesame oil), which we all helped assemble. This process was not photo-documented, largely because I’m not a very good journalist but also because I wasn’t entirely sure how they would turn out. I had returned from the shore the previous Sunday with a pile of wonton wrappers (isn’t that what your mom sends you home with after you visit for a weekend?), and this seemed like as good a use as any I was likely to find. It turns out that (a) fried dumplings are preferable to steamed and (b) dumplings are more exciting than noodles. I suppose I should not be surprised at either of those findings.

In any case, we sat down to a beautifully set table (I. and K. are expert napkin folders, even working with paper instead of cloth) and enjoyed our Asian feast immensely.

There was also some silliness in addition to dinner. But I think that’s inevitable with this crowd.

Pork Dumplings
This “recipe” is obviously very adaptable. You can spice it up with chile oil or add in some minced ginger or fish sauce or garlic or really anything. Also I have no idea how many it makes…

1 stack of wonton wrappers
1/2 lb. ground pork
1 large or 2 small leeks, cleaned and sliced into thin half-rounds
2-3 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
peanut or vegetable oil (something with a high smoke point)

Mix the pork with the leeks, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Put small spoonfuls in the center of each wonton wrapper and close them up, brushing a little water around the edge to seal them properly. Try to get as much air as possible out of the dumplings.
To steam, place in a single layer in a steamer (the metal kind works though bamboo is probably easier) over boiling water. Cook for 5-10 minutes, until they are firm to the touch.
To fry, heat a little oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook a few minutes on each side, again until they are firm to the touch.
Serve with the dipping sauce of your choice (the ginger-scallion dressing is a good one, thinned out with a little more grapeseed oil).

Dirt Candy

There is this great restaurant down in the East Village called Dirt Candy. The chef’s philosophy is something along the lines that vegetables are awesome and deserve place of pride on the dinner plate. And as much as I love a good burger, I tend to agree. I wish I had access to a proper garden of my own so I could grow dirt candy for myself. But all I have is my window box full of herbs, which magically survived the incredibly snowy winter we had this year. (And, of course, my CSA, which doesn’t start up again until June.)

The harvesting, though, is only part of the joy of growing vegetables. The other part is the digging in the dirt. Which is how I spent the day yesterday, volunteering through New York Cares at the Padre Plaza Success Garden in the South Bronx. They were preparing a section of the park to add more raised garden beds, so we turned over top soil, and pulled out roots, and made a valiant effort to remove a tree stump. (The stump won the battle, but not the war.)

And then I swung by the greenmarket and picked up some dirt candy of my own, for dinner. I had bought some leeks earlier in the week (and the generous vendor gave me a bunch of lavender for free, prompting the 4th use of my ice cream maker this month–honey lavender ice cream). To that, I added some mushrooms, eggs, and honey chevre. And when I got everything home, after taking a 2 hour nap, it turned out I was making quiche. The leek/mushroom combination seemed especially apt, given that both are notorious for needing a lot of cleaning, because the same could be said for me after my day of playing in the dirt volunteering.

This is my sister’s olive oil crust (made with thyme from my window box). I am hit or miss at rolling out pie crusts, so this is a very useful recipe to have.

(Note to self: don’t leave your cell phone on the counter when making something that involves flour.)

These are the aforementioned leeks.

The traditional method of preparing leeks involves slicing down the length of the stalk, almost to the root, washing carefully in a tub of water, and then slicing up. I prefer cleaning them a la Hesser: slice them up first, and THEN wash them (a salad spinner is wonderfully useful for this).

Then the leeks go in a skillet with a chunk of butter and some salt.

Slice up the mushrooms:

and add them to the skillet (with maybe some more butter…)

Meanwhile, scramble together 5 eggs and a cup-ish of milk. Mix the sauteed veggies in (a little at a time–don’t want to cook the eggs before they even get in the oven) and some crumbled up chevre.

Bake at 375F for, oh, 45 minutes or so. Until the middle is cooked.

My new camera is WAY better than the old one (thanks, mom!) but even so, I can’t make this quiche look pretty. It is delicious, so it has that going for it, but you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Leek and Mushroom Quiche
crust:
1 1/4 c. flour (I used whole wheat pastry)
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 c. (or more) of olive oil
1/2-1 tsp fresh herbs, chopped (I used thyme)
2-4 Tbsp water

filling:
1 bunch leeks
1/2 lb mushrooms (criminis work great)
2 Tbsp butter
5 eggs
1 c. milk
2 oz. goat cheese (I used the honey chevre from Patches of Star Dairy)
salt & pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 375F.
Mix the crust ingredients together in a small bowl with a fork, until they are just fully combined. Use only as much water as you need. Press the dough into a 9″ pie crust, going as far up the sides as you can.
Clean & slice the leeks in whatever way you like. Heat a pan over medium heat and add 1 Tbsp butter. When it’s melted, add the leeks and salt and saute until they are starting to color. Meanwhile clean and slice the mushrooms. Add them to the pan, with another Tbsp of butter. Cook just until the mushrooms have lost that raw look.
Let the veggies cool while you scramble together the eggs and the milk. Mix them in gradually, and then add the goat cheese, in chunks. Season with a little more salt and some fresh ground pepper. Pour the whole mess into the pie crust and stick it in the oven. Cook for 40-60 minutes, until the center is fully cooked.

Cooking Without a Net

There are a few meals in my repertoire where I don’t measure, I don’t weigh, I don’t look at a recipe, I just know it’s going to come out right. I’m not talking about “let’s see what leftovers will go well tossed in a salad” kind of meals, I mean legitimate COOKING.

Well, “a few” might be an exaggeration. One, at least. And that one is risotto. And it’s what I made this week when J. came over for dinner. The vegetables of choice were acorn squash and leeks (though I was a little sad that I’d settled on that combination before seeing this recipe for corn pudding in acorn squash; maybe next week).

First, to roast the cubed squash, with some summer savory (only a little bit left now…)

And then to wash the damn leeks. I do like leeks very much, but boy oh boy, is it a pain in the ass to get all that dirt off them.

Butter + olive oil in a pan, + leeks + salt + more fresh herbs.

Add the roasted squash

Then a couple of handfuls of arborio rice

Pour in a glass of white wine, and when it’s cooked off, start adding ladles full of simmering chicken stock (this is my not-homemade stock of choice when I don’t have any saved in the freezer) until the rice is cooked through.

Finish off with ground pepper and a lot of grated parmesan.

A never fail recipe that takes a fair amount of attention but not a lot of effort, and not nearly as much time as some people think.

Return of the Prodigal Daughter

Let me start by saying that there is no cheese in this dish. You read that correctly. This is an egg dish that contains no cheese whatsoever, and yet it is delicious. I didn’t think that was possible.

Now that that’s out of the way–E. has returned to the city! Hooray!

I had this whole lovely post written out, about adapting this recipe from Bon Appétit, which I first saw on Smitten Kitchen and then Blogger decided that it was going to log me out and make me sign in again, and the draft saving hadn’t worked. So it’s gone and I just do not have the patience to re-write it all. So here’s the short version of my adaptation:

Eggs and mix of heavy cream + milk, seasoned. Savory semi-whole-wheat version of Martha Stewart’s pate brisee.

2 leeks + diced chard stems, cooked in butter with summer savory. Then add chard leaves.

Mix cooled veggies into the eggy bowl, and pour it into the pie plate.
Wonder idly why your camera started adding these funny streaks to some photos.
Bake at 425F for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350F for another 15.

Done and done.

E. and I both had two helpings, and then went through her GRE flashcards. It turns out I’ve been misusing the word “nonplussed” my entire life.

The Veggies That Grow Together Go Together

I remember reading somewhere, not too long ago, that one of the principles of the now ubiquitous “seasonal cooking” concept is that things that grow in the same ground together, at the same time, tend to taste good on a plate together. So it’s kind of gratifying when I start looking up recipes for the weekly bounty and find something that prominently features multiple items.

Such was the case with Deborah Madison’s potato and leek gratin, which J. and I made Thursday night. Potatoes? Check. Leeks? Check. We cut the recipe almost in half (I only got 2 lbs. of potatoes), made it in an 8″x8″ baking dish, and subbed in cheddar for gruyere. Which only means I have to make it again so I can do a proper taste test between the two…

Mandolin the potatoes, slice and rinse the leeks, and dump them in a pot with a couple of sliced garlic cloves, a bay leaf, and a couple of thyme sprigs. Cover with milk, add a couple of big pinches of salt, and simmer gently until the potatoes are tender.

Note: keep the heat as low as you can, or else be prepared to spend some quality time at the sink, scrubbing scalded milk off the bottom of the pan.

Drain the whole thing over a bowl so you reserve the milk. Then layer the potato mixture in a baking dish, alternating with shredded cheese, and seasoning with black pepper and nutmeg.

(for another example of J.’s skills at neatly layering thin slices of potato see this entry)

End with a layer of cheese, pour in the reserved milk (or most of it), and stick it in a hot oven.

Tada!

As a side, I prepared braised collard greens. I have decided that this vegetable is not destined to become a commonplace ingredient in my kitchen, because I don’t understand how a leafy vegetable that needs to be cooked for at least a half an hour can possibly retain any nutrients. And while I like the flavor enough, there are lots of others I like more.

In this preparation, first you have to boil the greens (stems removed) for 10 minutes. THEN you put them in a skillet with a tablespoon of ghee, some sliced green onions, and some of the cooking liquid for at least another 15 minutes, ideally more. Serve with hot pepper sauce (the spice and the vinegar are both great complements to the deep slightly bitter richness of the collards).