Spring Green (and Red)

There’s this bread that I learned to make from smitten kitchen. It’s a version of Russian black bread, the ingredient list is 17 lines long, and it’s amazing. And believe it or not, I usually have nearly all 17 ingredients lying around–a shallot, apple cider vinegar, molasses, baking chocolate… And this Patricia Wells recipe gave me the perfect excuse to make it. 

Truthfully, it’s just a salad and a sandwich. But it’s with butter lettuce and radishes (two things we were getting in large quantities for a couple of weeks) and calls specifically for a dark rye bread. I am quite fond of sliced radishes on buttered bread with a little sea salt, and this is kind of an elaboration on that theme. Plus a salad.

You’ll need radishes that have good, fresh, green leaves still attached. Take the best of those (if they all look good, then use maybe 1/3 of the bunch) and chop them up finely. Slice the radishes themselves into rounds, and then chop the bulk of the pile–about 3/4–into little strips. Dry the chopped leaves & little chunks of radish as best you can, with a paper towel.

Then get some really good quality butter, and smash in some lemon zest. Once it’s mixed, add the radish/leaves mixture, and a bit of salt, and smoosh it all together. Spread it thickly on slices of bread, and sprinkle with a little more salt. There’s your sandwich portion of the meal.

For the salad, it’s just a mix of butter lettuce, the sliced rounds of radish, and a creamy lemon-chive dressing (1/2 & 1/2, lemon juice, salt, and chives) which I suspect would also be very good made with buttermilk instead of cream & lemon juice. 

As a whole, it’s a wonderful early summer meal for a hot night when you don’t feel like turning on the stove. It helps if you have homemade bread and European butter and fleur de sel and all that jazz, but no worries if you don’t. In any case, go heavy on the butter and light on the salad dressing, and enjoy.

(And, if you have extra dressing, it goes wonderfully with zucchini that’s been run through the julienne slicer, tossed with a little salt, and left to drain a bit in a colander.)

Adventures in Salad

Yes, I understand that the reason people eat salad so frequently in the summer is that it is traditionally a meal that does not involve turning on the stove.

And yes, I do generally object to food bloggers who post “recipes” for salads.

But I like breaking rules occasionally. Even (especially) my own rules. Plus I keep reading about grilled romaine, and I happen to have 2 big heads of the stuff in my fridge. And I might not be fortunate enough to have an actual grill, but I have an awesome grill pan (thanks, Mary & Gay!), and I always like trying new techniques.

So the first thing to do is take the romaine and strip off some of the outer leaves until you’re left with something that you can look at and say, “Yes, I would no longer call that a head of lettuce, that is now a heart of romaine.” Please, please, please, do not go buy a sealed plastic bag of romaine hearts. God only knows how those things have been treated. I wish I didn’t know as much as I do about food safety–I wish I didn’t have to know–but I follow Bittman’s blog on my google reader and he has a guy named Barry Estabrook write posts that frequently scare the hell out of me and remind me exactly why I spend all my money at the greenmarket even though I also belong to a CSA. Seriously, kids, check out this post from just today:

Earlier this month, federal marshals seized 3,500 gallons of honey from a Philadelphia warehouse. The honey, which had been imported by Sweet Works, Inc. from China, contained chloramphenicol, an antibiotic that is not approved for use in food, animal food, or food-producing animals in the United States.

Antibiotics?? In HONEY?? Honey has antibacterial properties. You can put honey on a cut if you are out of neosporin and it will protect you from infection. Plus it never goes bad–archaeologists have found honey in Egyptian tombs that is still just fine. Honey is magical, which is just one of the many reasons I don’t understand vegans. But that is enough of a rant for right now. I will leave the vegans alone for another day.

Back to dinner. You buy a full head, strip off the leaves to be used for a normal salad at a later date, and that’s that. Cut the lettuce in half lengthwise, drizzle each half with some olive oil and sprinkle with salt & pepper.

Then you want to get started on the caramelized onions. I should probably point out that I don’t have the patience to actually caramelize onions, and because of that I have learned that I quite like crispy, charred onions on my salad. It gives sort of a smoky bacon-y flavor without actually adding any meat (and uncooked onions keep a hell of a lot longer and more easily than uncooked bacon). Also it is the key to my newest favorite salad dressing. Heat up a heavy skillet over medium/medium-low, and then add a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Dump in some thinly sliced onions (I used cipollinis tonight, but shallots are excellent, too, or whatever you have lying around) and let them cook, stirring occasionally. When they get to a level of brown that pleases you, turn off the heat.

If you are the cautious type, wait a few minutes for the pan to cool before this next step. If you are like me, just pour in some red wine vinegar and watch it sizzle and spatter. (You might want to jump back.) Stir it all up, sprinkle in some salt, and add a little more olive oil. There’s your dressing.

On another burner, you’ve got your grill pan going, right? Right. Relatively high heat. Once it’s hot, put the romaine hearts on, cut-side down, and let them cook a few minutes, just until you get grillmarks. Take ’em off, put ’em on a plate, and pour the dressing on top. Scatter some gorgonzola over it (shaved parmesan would be nice, also, if you’re not into blue), and voila.

If, at this point in the game, you find yourself thinking, as I did, “You know, I really want to make a mess of this thing called a salad. What else can I do to it to offend everyone’s sensibilities?” The answer: a fried egg. Or two. Wheee!

So heat back up the skillet you used for the dressing, coat it with a little more olive oil, just to be safe, and crack in a couple of eggs. Ideally you want them sunny-side up, so the yolks are still running and they mix in with the dressing and yes, I know you don’t like runny yolks, but I promise, it’s just better this way. Slide the eggs right on top of the lettuce and Bob’s your uncle.

Also, a side note today: I’m trying out a new blog hosting site, which a friend of A.’s started a while back. So if you’re reading this on blogspot, come on over and check out the alternate format: The CSA Files on Posterous. For now, my posts will be going both to blogspot and posterous, but presumably I’ll decide soon enough if I like one host better than the other. If you have an opinion, please weigh in.

 

Iconoclastic Grilled Romaine Unsalad

serves 1 for dinner (I had a very light lunch, so this might not be strictly accurate)

 

1 heart of romaine lettuce, split in half lengthwise

1 small onion, or 1 shallot, sliced thin

2 eggs

olive oil

salt & pepper

red wine vinegar

gorgonzola cheese, crumbled

 

Heat a skillet over medium-low heat. Drizzle in a tablespoon of olive oil and add the onion slices. Cook, stirring occasionally, until it’s more or less caramelized. Turn off the heat and let the pan cool a little before adding in a couple tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Stir together and pour in a little more olive oil. Season with salt to taste.

Meanwhile, heat a grill(pan) over high heat and drizzle a bit of olive oil on the cut sides of the pieces of romaine hearts. When the grill is hot, put the lettuce on, cut-side down. Cook for a couple of minutes, until you can see grill marks, then remove from the heat.

Add a little more olive oil to the skillet. Put the heat at low, and when it’s hot, crack in a couple of eggs. Cook sunnyside up, just until the whites are cooked, leaving the yolks very runny.

Pour the onion dressing on top, scatter on the cheese, and slide the eggs on top of everything.

Cooking and Skyping the Night Away

Last night, I put on a cooking show for my sister and my nephew. We had a Skype date that coincided with dinner-making time, so I just aimed the computer towards the stove (one reason, at least, to be glad of a NYC-sized kitchen) and we chatted away. Rather, my sister and I chatted while the baby played and giggled and crawled a little bit. I declined to do a Julia Child impression, though I kind of felt like I was on the Food Network.

The recipe in question was from Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s The Italian Country Table: Home Cooking from Italy’s Farmhouse Kitchens, another one of those free cookbooks I’ve been ignoring for several years. It’s for a pasta dish with a roasted pepper sauce that you make by roasting all the ingredients in a jelly roll pan. It sounded like a great way to use some of the varieties of sweet peppers we got this week.

First you chop everything up–peppers, onions, garlic, some fresh herbs, and some lettuce, which was an interesting addition. (You can also use escarole or radicchio, but lettuce is what I had. That is going to be my new motto in the kitchen: because that’s what I had.) Anyway, toss with a little balsamic–

and while it’s marinating, have a little chat with your adorable red-headed nephew.

Then here’s a technique I’ve never seen before: you preheat the oven with the jelly roll pan inside. When it’s hot, pull it out and drizzle olive oil on it, and then dump in the sauce ingredients. They will sizzle when they hit the pan, which I suppose shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it is a little unusual to hear something sizzle in a jelly roll pan.

Roast away for a while, until the peppers are starting to brown like roasted peppers do, and the greens are all crispy. Then finish it off with a little more balsamic, and toss with the pasta.

I really liked this recipe, but my note in the margin of the cookbook is going to be that the ratio of sauce to pasta needs to be higher. It’s a pretty hearty sauce, with not a lot of liquid, and frankly I wanted more of it.