Memorias españoles

I am quite fond of Spanish food. My first real introduction to the cuisine was through my host mother (my se ñora) during a semester studying abroad in Sevilla. I’d written on my housing form something to the effect that I like to cook and would prefer to live with a family where I could learn something about what Spaniards eat at home. Given the fact that we’d been warned how territorial Spanish women can be of their kitchens, and how many students would barely be permitted to ENTER that room, I got very, very lucky with my living assignment. Not only was my host mom, Chari, a wonderful cook, but she was more than happy to have me in the kitchen with her. Whichever of us woke up first in the morning would put the coffee on (which is how I came to own one of these). I was encouraged to assemble my own lunches on days when I wouldn’t be coming back to the apartment in Los Remedios–that alone set my experience far apart from that of my classmates. And I was very grateful for that.

Spanish food is often very simple. There are paellas, sure, for very special occasions, but more often than not, lunch (“la comida”) would be a pot of vegetables cooked until the flavors were properly mingled, with maybe some sausage mixed in, or else one egg for each of us cracked on top. The meal was ready when the egg had cooked through. Dessert, most days, was a piece of fruit or a cup of yogurt. My very favorite dish was salmorejo, a variation on gazpacho involving a mere 6 ingredients including salt (but discounting the traditional toppings of hard-boiled egg and chopped jamon serrano). I’ll have to write about salmorejo this summer. It is one of those recipes that counts as a revelation.

Anyway. This Spanish-inspired recipe from the Times for green beans with potatoes and garlic is of a kind with many things Chari cooked for me, and it was a perfect use of the pouch of frozen green beans that arrived one month from Winter Sun Farms.

Steam some green beans and potatoes, separately, until just cooked. Smash up some garlic and salt with the side of a knife and cook, barely, in a little olive oil. Add in the veggies and stir a bit, until the oil and garlic have coated everything nicely and things start to get a little brown. Season with salt (and pepper, she says, though in my mind, you should be using enough garlic to get a good level of spice–Spaniards love their garlic). Serve with diced hard-boiled egg scattered on top.

This would make a wonderful summer meal, eaten on a picnic blanket, with a bowl of salmorejo to accompany it. Note to self: come back to this recipe when tomatoes are in season.

Top Your Own Pizza Party

This past Sunday, L., M., P., and our respective +1s came over for the latest round of Cook Club. We had all semi-tacitly agreed that it would be a more casual affair this time, and for whatever reason, I settled on making pizza. I made a bunch of antipasti/salads, prepped the toppings, made the dough, went a little crazy at Murrays’, and let everyone do their own thing. 

The pre-pizza spread: kidney beans with shallots and parsley; pan-seared shishito peppers; Treviso potato salad (with radicchio, from Lynne Rossetto Kasper); Sweet and Sour Grilled Pumpkin (which I’ve made before); Shredded Collard Greens with Walnuts and Pickled Apples; and sweet-tart salad of basil, sorrel, and apple (also from Rossetto Kasper–this was the star of the show, I think).

Really, though, the point is the pizza. Because of the limited amount of space in my oven, and also in my kitchen, we made our pizzas in pairs. But pizza only takes 10 minutes to cook (which I know to be a fact, from my summer working at Panzone’s) and cheese retains heat better than just about anything, so we all still ate at roughly the same time. I’d made pesto, and tomato sauce (from the many pounds of tomatoes A. and I picked up at Stoneledge), roasted peppers, made “oven-candied” tomatoes, cooked up some sausage, caramelize some onions, and bough pepperoni and mushrooms.

Enough with the preamble. Here are our beautiful creations:

For dessert, we had cookies and ice cream. There had been a request for a repeat of the pink peppercorn ice cream I made back in May, and who am I to deny someone ice cream? It’s a pretty basic vanilla custard base, with the addition of a tablespoon of ground pink peppercorns (separate post to come on that, probably). And then when you make ice cream, you wind up with a lot of unused egg whites–so I was pleased to find a recipe for something called Chocolate Puddle Cookies on 101 Cookbooks that requires a lot of them.

More photos of everything here.

It was, as always, a lovely evening in wonderful company. I am so, so glad that we started Cook Club. I think we could probably be eating take out and drinking box wine (not to knock box wine–there are some really good ones out there) and have just as good a time together, but thankfully, we have the option to have homemade meals with good friends, and who could ask for more than that?

Labor of Love

Last weekend–or two weekends ago, by now–was the first night of Cook Club. As I mentioned in a previous post, M., L., P., and I have started this club, and I was the first to host.  And I just have to say, I have never prepared a meal quite like that before, and I’m not likely to do it again anytime soon.  Even when it’s my turn to host again, I don’t think 6+ courses for 8 people is going to happen.  After Sunday, I needed about 2 days to recover before my brain came back online.

But the truth is that I loved every moment of it, from the trips to the greenmarket, to waiting while the fishmonger gutted & scaled my red snapper, testing the cheese, wrapping each asparagus spear–it was an utter joy.  A labor of love, as the expression goes.  In part, it was love for my friends, my delightful dinner companions, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that it was more for the love of food, the kitchen, the cooking process.  Or maybe it’s really the intersection, playing hostess, because that’s where I get to enjoy my food with my dear friends.  And nothing makes me happier than that.

I’ve done an overview of the menu already, but here are the highlights, in living color (not a terribly thorough documentation, I’m afraid, since we all got a little too caught up in the eating to remember to photograph the dessert course…).

Olives with almonds, blood oranges, dried red peppers, and thyme (Tyler Florence’s recipe), ready to go in the oven:

The table set with hors d’oeuvres (the olives, plus Smitten Kitchen’s cheese straws, and grilled asparagus wrapped in prosciutto or truffled cheese with pear mostarda):

 

Cucumber avocado soup with lime:

Ready to serve the soup course:

Spinach salad with pine nuts, golden raisins, and blood orange vinaigrette:

One of the two red snappers I cooked:

Same, after being stuffed with blood oranges, shallots, and herbs, crusted with salt & egg white and baked for a half hour or so:

And this is what was inside when we cracked open the crust:

Me, trying to portion out the tasty filets without butchering the fish too badly:

And here you can see not only both fish (one still crusted) but the potato ramp gratin in the background:

(There are loads more photos of the whole fish process at my flickr feed, courtesy of M., who served as my staff photographer for most of the night.)

And this, sadly, is the only evidence of the rhubarb tart.  The vanilla pink peppercorn ice cream went too quickly to show up on camera at all.

I think, though, that it is likely I will make the ice cream again.  The tart was good, for sure, but there is only so much time left in the rhubarb season, and if I’m going to make something else, I’ll want to try another recipe.

And so, almost 5 hours later, we declared Cook Club a success, and called our first meeting to a close.
And C. was a darling and broke the rules by doing almost all the dishes for me.  We’ve figured out the date for the next round (last weekend of June), and I for one can’t wait.  Playing hostess is the best, but being a guest can be pretty damn awesome, too.

Pre-Thanksgiving

I took off the whole of Thanksgiving week, partly as a birthday present to myself and partly to avoid having to travel on Wednesday. One side effect of this plan was making dinner for a bunch of family friends at my mom’s house on Tuesday evening. The menu:

*pecan-crusted catfish filets
*roasted beet salad with goat cheese and caramelized shallots, with a fall-themed dijon vinaigrette (made with apple cider vinegar and maple syrup)
*colcannon, very loosely adapted from this recipe
*Fish Market apple pie, aka my birthday pie (apple cider crust, sour cream-based filling)

I hesitated for about a second and a half when deciding to make the colcannon, because I know potatoes were bound to feature heavily on everyone’s plates on Thursday, but I figured this would be a good chance to make a non-traditional mashed potato dish (not traditionally American, that is).

The first step is to cut the stems off the kale and boil it in salted water, just until it’s tender, 5-10 minutes depending on the age of your kale.

Drain it, chop it roughly, and set it aside.

Then cut up the potatoes and boil THEM in salted water (you can peel them if you like, but I prefer not to).

While they are cooking, chop up a few shallots

and saute them in a good amount of butter. When they have started to brown a little, add some milk/cream/half & half/sour cream/dairy of your choice, and also the kale. Season with some dill, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

When the potatoes are mashable texture, drain them and then toss them back in the pot. Add in the kale/shallot mixture and mash it all up until it’s the consistency you like.

It probably won’t be super creamy, but I think that’s for the best.

Monochromatic but Polygustative

My birthday dinner this year is brought to you entirely by Monica Bhide’s Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen. My friend L. came over and we picked a few things to make that required only a few additional ingredients to be purchased. I had been fixated on the garlic smashed potatoes for a while, and to go with that we chose cauliflower roasted with a fennel chili spice rub (which I’d made once before), and a tamarind chicken recipe adapted for tofu, because I’d been eating a lot of meat lately.

The cauliflower couldn’t be simpler. The spice rub is a mix of toasted fennel seeds crushed up with dried red peppers, black pepper seeds, and coriander. Toss it together with some cauliflower florets and some vegetable oil–

and roast at 400F for 30 minutes, tossing once halfway through.

Then for the potatoes, cook potatoes as for regular mashed, and mix in some melted butter. Then cook some mustard seed, shallot, garlic, and hot peppers (yay for a stash of jalapenos in the freezer!) in vegetable oil, mix in some shredded coconut, and then mash all that into the potatoes.

The result is very flavorful and not as cream-laden as traditional mashed potatoes (a welcome alternative, since Thanksgiving is just around the corner and we’re all bound to O.D. on butter and cream soon enough). Garnish with fresh cilantro.

And then, for the tofu. Saute some shallot and hot peppers in vegetable oil–

and add in some cubed tofu.

Cook, stirring, until it starts to brown a little, and then stir in a little turmeric.

Then turn off the heat and mix in some tamarind chutney–or, if you were planning last minute and live closer to an Italian gourmet market than to Kalustyan’s, a tablespoon each of tamarind paste and fig jam. A surprisingly good combination–L. and I were very proud of our ingenuity–and one that worked very well with the tofu.

When we put everything on the plate, I commented that we happened to choose three recipes that were all in a white/cream/yellow color palate–a white meal, as my mom would call it. But while they were maybe not so visually stimulating, there is a TON of flavor in these three dishes.

And then we O.D.’d on cupcakes from Crumbs for dessert. Because that’s what birthdays are really about.

Fast Food

What I really wanted to make tonight was this mashed potato recipe from Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen that’s got mustard seed and hot peppers and coconut flakes and sounds fantastic. But what it does not sound like is a complete meal, and I did not have the energy to make TWO dishes. So instead I turned to Deborah Madison once again, for her Indian-Style Saute of Cauliflower and Greens. The greens I had were kale and the greens from the actual cauliflower (they are edible, which I should have known intuitively but had to be told about on somebody else’s blog) so I altered the recipe by boiling them a bit ahead of time. (The original calls for spinach and watercress, which just need to be wilted when they’re added into the rest of the already-hot dish.)

In any case, you need some potatoes, and some cauliflower, and an onion, and a bit of carrot.

The onion gets sliced thin and sort of caramelized in ghee (or clarified butter).

The potatoes get peeled, diced, and steamed or boiled until tender.

The greens, if you’re not using something like spinach, should be cooked sort of al dente.

The cauliflower gets quartered and sliced thin, which is not how I’d usually cut it up. Brown it in more ghee/butter–

and then add in the caramelied onions and some garlic, as well as turmeric, cumin, coriander, and mustard seeds.

Chop up the greens, grate the carrot–

and then add them into the pan, too, with some salt and water (the cooking water from the greens works perfectly).

Cover it and let it cook until the greens are cooked through and most of the water has cooked off. Then finish it off with lime juice and fresh cilantro.

I was surprised by how NOT overwhelming the spices were in this dish. That seems like an odd comment to make–and I don’t mean it in a bad way–but it was my immediate reaction. My second reaction was, “Did I really just make this dish in less than an hour?” In the future, though, I think I’ll go with spinach for this one. I think there was too much brassica in one pot this time.

New favorites

So I have been a bit overloaded with potatoes lately. For several weeks now, we’ve been getting 4 POUNDS of potatoes with each delivery. It’s a little ridiculous. So I keep looking for new interesting ways to prepare them. Often it winds up being just a variation on mashed potatoes (with celeriac, with kale, with turnips, with mustard seed, hot pepper, and coconut…) but that never feels like a whole meal.

This recipe, on the other hand, is not only a legitimate meal unto itself, it’s also my new favorite thing in the world. It comes from Deborah Madison’s giant veggie cookbook, and it is a Lebanese stew with chickpeas, carrots, and tomatoes.

Start off by cooking some chopped onion in olive oil. Meanwhile mash up some garlic with ground coriander (that was a new technique to me–I’ve seen garlic mashed with salt, but never a spice).

Then in go the potatoes, cut into a chickpea-sized dice, the carrots in a rough chop, the garlic/coriander mix, and a dried hot pepper.

Cook that for a while, and then add the chickpeas…

and some peeled, diced tomatoes.

Stir it all up, add a bit of water, and simmer until the potatoes are cooked through, maybe 20 minutes.

Garnish with chopped parsley, some lemon juice, and black olives (I used oil-cured Moroccan olives, which seemed like the best choice from the options at Agata & Valentina).

Once again, I learned that Deborah Madison has most of the answers (the question being in this case, “What do I do with these potatoes?”). I also learned, again, to trust her marginalia, which advised for this recipe that it is also good cold. And is it ever. I enjoyed this quite a lot when it was straight out of the pot, but somehow after sitting in the fridge overnight, it tasted ten times better the next day, not even heated up. I find that to be rare with potato dishes especially.

Beans, Beans, They’re Good for the Soup

Several years ago, I took a greenmarket cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education here in New York. The class met at the Union Square greenmarket and basically just bought what looked interesting, what was in season, what we’d never tried before. Then we brought it all back to the kitchens and made a big lunch. One of the things we made (it was July) was this vegan corn chowder with cranberry beans and some kind of leafy green. This is not that chowder. But it is a soup, with cranberry beans (I think) and potatoes and a leafy green (kale).

Here are the aforementioned beans. They’re quite pretty, although I am always sad that cranberry beans lose their beautiful speckles when you cook them. They look like they might have been the inspiration for certain flavors of Jelly Bellies.

Here they are en masse (they didn’t need to go in the pot yet, I just liked the way they looked).

I am told that recently dried beans (as opposed to beans that have been sitting in the supermarket for months on end) do not really need to be soaked, and will only take an hour or so to cook. This recipe assumes that starting point.

So after rinsing the beans and tossing away the few that had (sadly) gotten a bit moldy while the pods were drying, heat some oil in a big pot.

Add some onion and saute until it starts to brown, then add the beans. Cover with a few cups of water, enough so there’s at least an inch or two on top of the beans, and bring to a simmer. Cook for maybe 45 minutes, adding whatever herbs you think will work–I tossed in a bay leaf, a few sprigs of summer savory, and a few inches of fresh rosemary (yay windowbox!). Add more water as needed if it starts to get low.

After about 45 minutes, check on the beans. They should be starting to get soft, but not fully tender yet. Add in some diced potatoes, and more water if necessary, and a bunch of salt. Give it another 10-15 minutes, and then check on both the beans and the potatoes. They should both be just about the right texture for eating, at which point you dump in a couple of big handfuls of leafy greens (stems removed).

Stir it all up, taste for salt, crank in some pepper, and call it a day. Oh, and you might want to remove the bay leaf and the stems from the other herbs if you happen to think of it…

It should be noted that although these recently dried beans did not require soaking, it was maybe not the smartest thing to assume I’d be having soup for dinner. It turned out that I got hungry before it was ready, and had an omelet instead (cheddar and apple). But it has been a great lunch all week.

Maybe when it’s corn season again I’ll try to reconstruct the chowder from that ICE class…

End of an Era

This past Friday marked what could very well be the last episode of “J. comes over for dinner and we watch Alias.” She is moving to Washington, DC, in barely more than a week. And while we’re all bummed she’s leaving the city, the most direct effect on this blog will be that I don’t have many other friends who, like J., will eat really just about anything, and are willing to trek to the Upper East Side for dinner on a regular basis.

Since she’s rather busy finishing up work this week, J. left it to me to find a recipe, and what I came up with was Root Vegetable Cobbler with Chive Biscuit Topping from Bon Appétit.

Start off with an onion, some carrots, some potatoes, and a turnip.

Cut them all up into roughly regular 1/2″ cubes. Cook the onion in butter until it starts to brown, and then add the other veggies, some dried mushrooms, some fresh thyme, cumin (that one surprised me), and black pepper.

Stir it all up, and then add some stock (I used chicken, because I avoid vegetarianism in as many small ways as possible) and some water. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes, then add in some heavy cream, frozen peas, fresh mushrooms, and chopped fresh chives. Bring THAT to a simmer and then mix in a tablespoon of butter mashed up with a tablespoon of butter. Stir it in and let it simmer until it starts to thicken.

Meanwhile, make the biscuit topping (J. did this part).

Pour the veggie mixture into a baking dish (epicurious said to use 6 2-cup dishes, but screw that–a 9X12 baking dish is perfect) and press out the biscuit dough into roughly the shape of the dish. It won’t cover the whole thing, but it shouldn’t. DO follow the suggestion to put a cookie sheet under the dish, though, because if it bubbles over, it’ll be a mess to clean out of your oven.

Bake the whole thing at 425F for 18 minutes. (I forgot to take a picture of the full dish right out of the oven.)

Best eaten while watching good TV with a good friend you’ve known since you were 10.

We’ll miss you, J.

Have you lived?

I don’t think you have lived. Until you have tried this Swiss chard recipe, I don’t think you have lived. Yes, that’s right, in the photo below, the slightly over-exposed, flash-heavy, un-color-corrected photo of my dinner, the most exciting thing on the plate is that messy mush of dark green on the right side.

More exciting than lamb chops? More exciting than potatoes (or anything, really) with pesto?! Yes. Trust me. Even when I tell you it’s vegan. Just trust me. Serve it with lamb chops to make up for that. Serve it with anything. It is my new favorite thing in the world and I fully plan to make huge batches of it and freeze it so I can always have it on hand.

Here is a close-up:

Not much to look at, but if you could see her like I do…

Here is what you need to do (thanks, again, to Deborah Madison):

Take a bunch of chard and separate the leaves and the stems. Cut the leaves into ribbons and the stems into a coarse dice. Dice a small onion, mash up a clove of garlic with some salt, and dump it all in a big pot with some olive oil, a little bit of water, a big handful of cilantro, a teaspoon of paprika, and a few grinds of black pepper. Stir it all up. Put the heat on low. Put a lid on it. Let the magic happen. Come back in 45 minutes (and maybe stir it once or twice in the interim).

That’s it. There’s no butter, no chicken stock, no parmesan. I cannot explain the depth of flavor in this dish knowing what goes in. It is making me completely rethink my stance on cooking vegetables for long periods of time.

The also-rans from the dinner in question:

Savory Mint Lamb Chops with window-box mint

Potato salad with pesto and green beans, a now favorite inspired by Smitten Kitchen

It was a very herb-heavy meal, and I was worried there’d be some conflicting flavors, but it was delicious. There’s no chard coming this week, but there is kale, and turnip greens, and it’s a 50/50 shot that I’m going to try the same recipe with one or both of those.