Hot Weather Cuisine

This ginger cucumber salad with scallops is one of my favorite recipes. A. and I first made it years ago, when it was first published in the New York Times, and I’ve made it many times since, usually served over basmati rice. Then suddenly it showed up again on the paper’s website, in video form, and just in time for a heat wave.

One of the reasons this has become a favorite dinner–especially in the summer–is there is very little standing in front of a hot stove involved. Also because the expression “cool as a cucumber” actually has a root in reality (cucumbers have cooling properties, just like cinnamon has warming properties). So when J. and I had made plans the other week for her to come over for dinner with C. and me, and it was suddenly 90+ degrees, it seemed like an obvious choice.

Start with cucumbers. Peel them or not, as you like, and slice them pretty thin. A mandolin helps greatly in this task. Toss them with rice vinegar, grated ginger, salt, & sugar. Let them stand for a while, producing what some chefs call a “quick pickle.”

If you’re planning on eating in a half an hour, that’s perfect. If dinner will be a little later, just stick them in the fridge (especially if it’s 90+ degrees out and you are too stubborn to turn on the A/C in your kitchen because it isn’t technically summer yet).

Don’t put away the mandolin yet, though. Use it to slice up a yellow onion into thin half moons.

Then comes the heat. Put a skillet (cast iron is wonderful) over very high heat, drizzle in a little vegetable oil, and sear a bunch of sea scallops. About a minute on each side is all you’ll need. Remove them to a plate, drizzle in a little more oil, and add those onions you sliced, along with a bit of turmeric. Lower the heat a tad, and cook about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft.

Then you just want to toss everything together.

This time, I served the dish over rice noodles, which I think was even better than the rice, and as a bonus takes much less time to cook (especially if you’re a hippie and only cook brown rice).

Bittman to the Rescue

I was out of town from last Thursday until late Monday, and then had a work function (read: booze cruise) (on a boat called the Romantica, captained by a guy who goes by the moniker “Papa Fish”) (seriously) Tuesday night, so it wasn’t until Wednesday that I was able to get back into the kitchen.  And yes, we did cook a bit while we were at Copper, but honestly, cooking on an electric stove just doesn’t do it for me.

Which is maybe how I justified turning the oven to 400F for, oh, an hour or so last night.  (More than that, actually, because I made a peach galette, too.)  Let me remind you that the high temperature recorded in Central Park yesterday was 93F, and even by 8 o’clock, it was still registering at 86F.  Let me also remind you that I don’t let much stand in the way of a recipe I especially want to make.

The recipe, in this case, is Mark Bittman’s Layered Vegetable Torte, which happened to be the Minimalist column yesterday.  Almost suspiciously convenient, no?  That he’d write about a dish that required pretty much exactly what I got in the vegetable box this week?  How could I not make this recipe immediately?  Considering that I’m heading to the shore for the weekend tomorrow, a recipe that used up this many different ingredients was exactly what needed to be made.

First you need a pile of veggies.  It doesn’t actually matter so much what you’ve got on hand, though something squashy is recommended. I had an eggplant, some zucchini, a bulb of fennel, a longish greenish sweet pepper that I can’t remember what it’s called, some scallions and garlic scapes, a few cherry tomatoes, and a veritable bouquet of fresh herbs. 

All the veggies get sliced into pieces about 1/4″ thick, drizzled with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and roasted at 400F for as long as it takes.  Turn once, after 10 or 15 minutes, and pull them out for good when they’re thoroughly soft.  Alternately, if you’re lucky enough to have a proper grill, that’ll work, too, just don’t tell me about it.  I love my grill pan, but with this quantity of veg, it’s just not big enough to get the job done in a timely manner.  Sigh.  One day, I will have a grill of my own, and a place to put it, and that day will be beautiful.  And you will all be invited over for dinner. (Oh, wait–you’re all already invited over.  So that much at least won’t change.)

I cut the scallions and scapes into pieces about 1″ long and roasted them, too, which in retrospect was maybe not the best idea.  I think it would have worked better if I’d kept them whole and put them in for only the last 10 minutes, which is what I did with the tomatoes. 

Anyway, get out your springform pan and oil it lightly.  You’ll either want to put it on a cookie sheet or wrap it in foil, because if it’s anything like mine, it’s not 100% watertight. Or oil-tight, rather.  Layer the veggies and chopped herbs, and chopped garlic if you’re using it.  Squish the layers together with a spatula, then sprinkle on a couple handfuls of breadcrumbs, and grate a pile of parmesan on top.  Do not skip the “drizzle with about 1 tablespoon oil” step, which is what I inadvertently did. 

Nothing awful will happen, but the cheese won’t brown quite properly without it (after 30 minutes in the oven, still at 400F).

So yes, 30 minutes.  Take it out, let it rest a bit, undo the springform, let it rest a bit more. 

Then slice it up, and serve with maybe some leftover polenta?

Oh, and about that galette: leftover bit of unrolled pie crust in the freezer, 4 peaches (peeled and chopped), juice of half a lime, a bit of honey, a tablespoon of butter cut into bits, wave the magic wand and bake for 40 minutes at 400F.  The sil-pat is essential here (thanks, mom!), or else I just don’t know how to prepare a galette, because the peach juice leaked out all over the place and it would have been a bitch and a half to clean off a cookie sheet.  I think I skimped on the honey, but other than that, it was delicious. 

Not My Grandmother’s Rösti

So in spite of roasting and freezing some beets, and bringing some to PA for pre-Thanksgiving dinner, I still had almost 2 pounds left in my fridge. Lucky for me, K. directed me to this Bittman recipe for Beet Rösti with Rosemary.

Rösti to me means potatoes, the way my Austrian grandmother made them thinly sliced and I guess sauteed with onions in oil, kind of like hashbrowns. But I’m always up for trying something new, especially if it’s got the Bittman imprimatur. So we pulled out the Cuisinart and went to work.

The recipe is impossibly simple, although there is some technique involved with the cooking. Grate 2 lbs of beets (and other root vegetables if you need to supplement–I added a potato and a turnip) on a box grater or a Cuisinart. Toss them in a bowl with salt & pepper, a few teaspoons of fresh chopped rosemary, and a half cup of flour.

Mix it up thoroughly and meanwhile, heat a 12-inch nonstick pan over medium heat, and melt in 2 Tbsp of butter. Once the butter starts to brown, pour the whole mess into the pan and let it cook for 8-10 minutes.

Then you have to do some fancy kitchen wizardry. Get the biggest serving platter you have (well, I needed my biggest one–you might have a better stocked kitchen) and put it upside down on top of the pan. Palm the back of the plate with one hand, grab the handle of the pan with the other, and VERY QUICKLY flip it over. If your pan is truly nonstick and you used enough butter and are having a lucky day, you should find yourself with a plate full of a half-cooked beet pancake, nicely browned.

Then gently slide it back into the pan so the other side can cook. It might be a good idea to add a little more butter to the pan first. Cook for another 8-10 minutes and then slide it back out onto the platter (or you can flip it back out if you’re feeling brave).

Top it off with some fresh chopped parsley and serve in wedges.

Word of the Day: Cruciferous

I have a news alert set on nytimes.com to send me an email every time a story is published in their Recipes for Health series. Each week, the author, Martha Rose Shulman, picks a theme of sorts (e.g. healthy grains; pantry items; vegetable pies) and offers up 5 recipes. They’re not always of interest (like the week on tomatoes that showed up just after all the news about the blight…) but especially with all the new-to-me ingredients I’ve been getting from Stoneledge, it’s nice to have an ever-growing list of new-to-me recipes of same.

However (and you know it’s big when I break the rules and start a sentence with “however”), my news alert did not work this week. This week’s theme was collard greens. So boo to you, New York Times. Luckily I have friends looking out for me, like A., who pointed me towards a Food Network recipe for Vegetarian “Southern-Style” Collard Greens, from someone named Sunny Anderson. I rarely watch the Food Network anymore (though I’ve recently discovered the marathons of Lidia Bastianich on some channel called Create…) so I have no clue who this Ms. Anderson is, but her recipe for collards fit the bill. And was delicious.

As with some kale I cooked up recently, the general methods are not unique. But there are some good small variations, and you can’t argue with the end result.

Start off with some onion in a big pot, in a mix of olive oil and butter (always a hit combination).

Add chopped garlic and red pepper flakes.

Then add the collards (the recipe doesn’t state this explicitly, but I implicitly inferred that the stems needed to be cut out before being chopped). I should note that this is in fact a mix of collards and turnip greens, since the two seem to be interchangeable in many ways, and I hadn’t yet used the greens from the previous week of turnips.

Stir it all up and then add a few cups of the stock of your choice (Better than Bouillon chicken is what’s generally in my fridge for occasions like this, though I’m in the market for a reliable pre-made vegetable stock) and cook, covered, for 40 minutes.

Then as a final touch, add some chopped tomatoes. I went with canned, because I had some leftover that needed to be used, so my greens were a bit more watery than they are probably meant to be. Still, a success. (Thanks for the tip, A.!)

And now, a brief interlude. It turns out, according to the emergent intelligence of wikipedia, that on a genetic level, collard greens are indistinguishable from kale (though not the Siberian variety), broccoli, cabbage (though not Napa cabbage), and cauliflower. That is probably not paraphrased very well. What I mean is that they are the same as far down as their genus and species (Brassica oleracea) and it is only at the cultivar level that they differ. Similarly, the turnip I am about to prepare (below) is the same thing as Napa cabbage, bok choy, mizuna, and broccoli rabe (Brassica rapa, hence rabe, or rapini). My understanding of plant genetics is that, therefore, any of those different cultivars could be crossed together without too much trouble (hence broccoflower). And the slightly obsessive organizer in me now wants to redo all the vegetable tags for this blog according to species…

Moving on.

This is the biggest turnip in all of creation. It weighed over 2 pounds.

After much debate, I decided to go with a Bittman recipe for Braised Turnips with Mustard Sauce that I found on a blog called Eat This. While collards and turnips do not make for the most bio-diverse of dinners, it turns out that the turnips take about 40 minutes to prepare, which is perfect because what else are you going to do while the collards are simmering? You’ve got all that time to kill anyway, so you might as well cut up the turnip into big chunks and cook it in olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, for 10 minutes or so, turning the pieces so they get nicely browned.

And then you can check on the collards, which are coming along nicely, before you pour in the stock of your choice and let the turnips simmer for 10-15 minutes, until they’re tender.

Check the collards again, then remove the cooked turnip chunks to a bowl. Mix together some whole grain mustard with cornstarch (or ideally arrowroot powder, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw away that stupid box of cornstarch just because it doesn’t really fit with my new hippy-dippy semi-healthy cooking preferences. I will use every last teaspoon of it if it kills me. Which it probably will.) and stir that into the liquid left in the pan.

Cook for a few minutes, until it thickens a bit, and pour it over the turnips.

I really like the flavor of this dish, but I have to confess I need to refine my turnip-cooking skills, because the texture is just mush. Sometimes mush is what you want, but I think these would have benefited from slightly less simmering.

Oh, and mustard is also in the Brassica genus (species varies by color of the seeds), so this dinner was REALLY low on the bio-diversity scale. At least there were some onions in there, and tomatoes…

Revelations

I have a thing about simple recipes. That kind of food is often the best, especially when you’re starting with the highest quality ingredients, but it bothers me when someone publishes a “recipe” for, say, grilled cheese. If you need to resort to a cookbook to learn how to melt cheese between bread, you have bigger problems than being hungry. But at the same time, it’s always nice to expand one’s repertoire of such meals. And for that, we turn to Mark Bittman. This week’s revelation was croutons made from grilled cheese. Yes, that’s right. Make a grilled cheese sandwich, extra crispy, let it cool a bit, and then chop it into cubes. Add to EVERYTHING.

For example, another Bittman suggestion, grilled zucchini with chopped tomatoes, dill, lemon juice and olive oil.

I did not intend to eat the entire salad in one sitting…

…but what I discovered was that the deliciousness that is the grilled cheese crouton gets a little soggy when you toss it with lemon juice and olive oil, and, oh well, guess it’s not going to be very good tomorrow.

Everybody Loves Bittman

A few possibilities for this week, stolen wholesale from Mark Bittman and the New York Times:

24 Cut zucchini into big chunks and roast or grill with olive oil (and, if you like, whole garlic cloves). Combine with chopped seeded tomatoes, lemon juice, dill, salt and pepper.

35 Steam frozen edamame and chill. Toss with olive oil, lemon juice, a pinch of sugar, lots of chopped mint, salt, pepper, and as much shaved pecorino or Parmesan as you like.

44. Make a crisp grilled cheese sandwich, with good bread and not too much good cheese. Let it cool, then cut into croutons. Put them on anything, but especially tomato and basil salad. This you will do forever.

20 Cut eggplant into half-inch slices. Broil with lots of olive oil, turning once, until tender and browned. Top with crumbled goat or feta cheese and broil another 20 seconds.

25 Upscale tuna salad: good canned tuna (packed in olive oil), capers, dill or parsley, lemon juice but no mayo. Use to stuff a tomato or two.