How Green Was My Breakfast

As an adult, I have lost my taste for overly sweet breakfasts. When I was a kid, I would regularly take the maple & brown sugar flavor of instant oatmeal, and then add more brown sugar to it. (This goes to show that permissive parenting and large quantities of sugar don’t destroy lives. I think I also put sugar on Frosted Flakes.) I still like maple syrup, and cinnamon buns, and chocolate croissants, but I’ve learned that including things like that in the first meal of my day just doesn’t work for me. Which is fine, because I have no problem eating a chocolate croissant as a mid-afternoon snack, or including maple syrup in any number of other things. But it complicates breakfast. 

The other complication is that I’m not usually ready to eat anything immediately after waking up. I like to have a cup of coffee right away, followed ideally by sitting with the paper, or my email, or the television for a while before I eat anything, often an hour or more later. The analogy C.’s dad gave me for this, which I really like, is that it’s like turning on a helicopter’s engine and waiting for the blades to start spinning up to speed before you take off. The problem, on weekdays, is that it means I need to bring my breakfast to work with me. Lately that means cereal, or pukkola*, which are definitely more sweet than savory, but still not covered in maple & brown sugar. Also they are highly portable, and require no special handling during my commute on the subway.

On weekends, I try to get more imaginative. This breakfast started with garlic scapes. I had been hoarding them for two weeks, with the intention of making garlic scape pesto for the first time, and last weekend, I finally made good on that promise.

Every garlic scape pesto recipe out there is more or less the same, mostly just varying in what kind of nuts to use, and the specific ratios. (There are some vegan versions out there, but I can’t attest to those.) It should all be to taste, anyway, and dictated by what you have in your kitchen. The ingredient list is: scapes, some kind of nut (pistachio, almond, pine nut are all fine–I used walnuts), parmesan, and olive oil, with an optional squeeze of lemon (I opted For). Puree in the Cuisinart and adjust flavors as necessary.

I will say, I didn’t quite anticipate how spicy this pesto would be. Garlic scapes are so much more mild than full-grown garlic that I was expecting it to be similarly mellow. But there are 8 large scapes in this thing, providing the bulk of the volume of the sauce, so I shouldn’t really have been surprised. Garlic is still garlic, especially when you puree the stuff. (Science break: the chemical that makes garlic spicy is contained in each cell, and released when you break down the cell walls. So the finer you chop or mince or puree raw garlic, the spicier it will be.)

Anyway, the breakfast construction came the next day. It involved some pumpernickel bread, a smear of pesto, some thick slices of avocado

a layer of cooked, chopped spinach, and some sliced basil leaves. And a sprinkle of sea salt & a drizzle of olive oil.

I liked it so much, I helped myself to seconds, and had it again the following day. I think even C. would enjoy this, although as lunch rather than breakfast. (She is of the opinion that breakfast is a meal that should not be contaminated with vegetables. She also wakes up starving and waits to have coffee until long after she’s eaten. It takes all kinds.)

*Note to self: write a post about pukkola when apple season starts again.

Garlic Scape Pesto

makes 1 cup

8-10 scapes, chopped roughly

1/3 c walnuts

1 oz parmesan

1/3 c olive oil

2 Tbsp lemon juice

Puree the scapes, walnuts, and parmeson in a food processor. With the machine running, drizzle in the olive oil and lemon juice. Taste for seasoning and add more of anything as needed. Store in the fridge or freezer.

Avocado & Spinach Tartine

serves 1

1 piece dark bread

garlic scape pesto

1/4 avocado

1/2 c cooked spinach, roughly chopped

4-5 fresh basil leaves, thinly sliced

sea salt

olive oil

Spread the pesto on the bread, then pile everything else on top in order. Best eaten with a fork & knife.

Degrees of Separation

I love it when I stumble across recipes that require just exactly what I have in my fridge. This Persian saffron-spiced stew is not technically one of those, but it’s pretty damn close. 

Eats Well with Others is a blog by another member of my CSA. She is in the big leagues as far as food blogging goes. She writes guest posts on Marcus Samuelsson’s website. Her superior photography skills have gotten her past the velvet ropes of Tastespotting. And I’m pretty sure people who are not related to her read her blog. But most importantly to me, she writes about the food she makes using exactly the same things as are in my own fridge. In this case, the recipe was already a meatless adaptation of a recipe from Healthy Cooking for the Jewish Home: 200 Recipes for Eating Well on Holidays and Every Day, which had been written up on a couple of OTHER food blogs. Already several degrees removed from the original, I’ve altered it again by skipping the pasta & swapping lentils for the split peas (because I didn’t have any split peas), which I cooked very simply, just adding a little salt at the end.

Then onto the veggies. The onion gets sauteed in a little olive oil, and then in goes the chopped spinach right on top. 

Once it’s wilted, add the diced eggplant and bell peppers, plus salt & pepper. 

Once the eggplant is starting to get soft, add chopped tomatoes, cinnamon, and saffron. Go easy on the saffron, and not just because it’s wicked expensive–the flavor can easily overpower whatever else is in a dish, taking it from delicate to metallic before you know it.

Then mix in tomato paste that’s been diluted in hot water, and the lentils (drained). Squeeze some lemon juice on top and serve in soup bowls, drizzle on a little good olive oil, and eat with some bread. Ideally a focaccia that’s got some goat cheese on it or something, just so you don’t find yourself accidentally eating another vegan meal.

As noted in the original recipe, this would probably be great with pasta, too, but I liked it just as a summer stew. Filling, but not heavy at all.

Rice Cake

I am becoming a little obsessed with Yotam Ottolenghi. This is one of three (3) posts I have saved as drafts that come from his recipes. And I don’t even have his cookbook yet, because the US edition doesn’t pub until April and the UK one was out of stock at Christmas. (It ought to arrive soon, though–thanks to my lovely cousin Kate.) But what I do have is his column in the Guardian in my Google reader, which is how I have discovered things like this beetroot saffron rice upside-down cake.

Let me just come out and say that I had no idea how this was going to go. The flavor combinations seemed pretty safe, but the actual construction of the thing looked like it might turn into a small disaster in my kitchen. But I had these beets lying around. Beets can lie around in the fridge practically forever and still be ok, but not literally forever. I had to use them eventually and this was the first recipe that caught my eye.

First step, sautee some spinach with a little garlic, just until it’s wilty. Then transfer it to a colander while you get the other pieces together.

Other pieces being, for one, rice. It needs to be parboiled, strained, and then seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon zest.

Then you deal with the beets. They should be peeled and sliced kind of thick. Sear them in the pan with a butter/oil mix, but don’t flip them.

Layer on top some rice, some water, the spinach, and the rest of the rice. Stick a lid on it and cook for a while, before adding some more water, and also some boiling water that was used to bloom (as they say) a pinch of saffron.

Lower the heat and cook, tightly covered, for another 45 minutes. Then comes the tricky part: flipping this “cake” onto a plate. You will want a plate that is at least 2 inches bigger in diameter than your pan. Put the plate over the pan, upside down, palm the plate, and flip the pan over, squeezing together as you do so you don’t wind up with rice and spinach all over the floor.

Thankfully, that did not happen to me, but what did happen was some of the beets stuck to the pan, because my Calphalon was getting old. Never fear, though: Calphalon has what is possibly the best warranty policy in the entire world. Ship them your old pot, with the flaking teflon that never gets properly clean anymore and that certainly doesn’t act as non-stick, and they will send you a BRAND NEW POT. It’s like magic. I swear I’m not being paid to say that.

On Things I Would Do Differently Next Time

Just because I’m detoxing doesn’t mean I can’t eat like a person. Especially with all these wonderful green things showing up in my fridge. The general guidelines for this week’s meal plan (my own adaptation of Alejandro Junger’s “Clean” elimination diet, which I found through goop.com) are geared towards making your digestive system work as little as possible, and for as few hours a day as possible. Hence cutting out things that are difficult to process (gluten, dairy) and designing meals that are liquid as often as possible. Specifically, the recommendation is to have a liquid breakfast and dinner, with a solid meal for lunch. Which translates into smoothie, salad, soup, repeat.

Tuesday night’s dinner was a spinach soup, inspired by one Orangette made a couple of years ago but sans butter or creme fraiche. And with scapes instead of green garlic, because that is what Stoneledge gives us. The actual preparation is so simple as to barely warrant a recipe: cook the garlic in a bit of olive oil, add some water or vegetable broth, add the greens, and probably some salt, cook just until they’re soft, and then blend up the whole mess. Actual amounts don’t really matter, nor do cooking times. It’s all, as the saying goes, to taste. (And in fact, the ingredients themselves don’t matter so much, either–use onions or scallions or leeks in place of the garlic, and chard or peas or broccoli for the spinach, it’ll all be delicious.) What follows are some tips on what you should watch out for should you make this soup yourself.

First, when you’re chopping up the scapes, if you have any trouble slicing through them (especially towards the bottom end), if your well-maintained chef’s knife meets any resistance, don’t use that bit. Trust me.

The spinach should cause you no issues. We get a variety called “summer spinach,” which I’m told is not actually spinach at all, but tastes really the same. It might be something called tetragonia, but I’m not sure. Either way. Baby spinach, even frozen spinach would be fine.

Next, it is advisable to slice the scapes a bit smaller than this. Cook them until they’re a bit soft, maybe starting to brown.

Add the water (or broth) and the oh-so-easy spinach…

Orangette recommends a very short cooking time once you add the spinach. Since mine was this wacky variety, not baby spinach, I wasn’t too concerned about that, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Next hurdle: blending hot liquids. NB: No matter how small an amount you think you’ve ladled into your blender, in batches, I can promise you that at least once you will wind up spattering soup all over the counter. And your arms. And possibly the floor. And any recipe cards that might be lying around because you’re too lazy to tuck them away once you’ve finished with them. So please, a half a cup at a time, no more. That said, my blender (inherited from my grandparents) is really pretty awesome, but I concede that a newer, larger model, with a lid that seals a bit more securely, might be able to handle a slightly larger quantity of soup.

And at last, the finished product. Note that if you did not successfully cut off the very tough bottom bits of the scapes, you’ll need to strain this soup–either in a seive or through your teeth. Personally I would not recommend either method. The first leaves you with a very watery soup and none of the delicious, hearty texture of the cooked spinach. The second just interrupts your meal and translates into a soup you really can’t serve anyone but yourself.

Really, though, it’s a very simple recipe…

Spinach and Garlic Scape Soup

5 oz. spinach, washed, any thick stems discarded
3 garlic scapes
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
2 1/2 c. water or vegetable broth
salt & pepper to taste

Slice the garlic scapes into small pieces, 1/4-1/2″, discarding any tough bits.
Heat a pot over medium-low heat and add the olive oil. Toss in the garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until it begins to soften and brown. Add the water or broth, and, unless your broth is salted already, a bit of salt. Bring to a soft boil.
Chop the spinach leaves into pieces, and add them to the pot. Cook just until the spinach starts to soften. Turn off the heat.
Ladle the soup into a blender, 1/2 cup at a time, and blend until smooth, pouring each portion into a bowl. When the whole pot has been processed, taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if necessary. A little lemon juice might be nice, too. (And if you are not detoxing or vegan, a spoonful of creme fraiche on each bowl will probably be delicious.)
Serves 2 for a light dinner, or more as a side dish.

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.

In Which We Attempt Indian Cuisine

As I’ve mentioned before, my heritage is Austro-Hungarian and Scotch-English, which means I am very, very white. It also means that any cuisine from outside of Europe seems very exotic to me. I can do an omelet or risotto blindfolded without even thinking about it, but I very happily depend on recipes for anything “exotic.” Such as Spinach with Potatoes, aka paalak wallae aloo. It is an incredibly simple dish that requires an inordinate number of items from the spice cabinet. I love that kind of thing, because I am not naturally gifted at combining spices to maximum effect, so making a recipe like this is an excellent learning experience.

Here we have the panoply of spices required, as well as the very few other ingredients:

This is not prepared in a wok, but I have learned from wok-cooking that when the recipe has a lot of steps that read along the lines of “add these spices, stir for 30 second, then add some minced garlic,” you are better off having prepped everything in advance. And it’s kind of fun to have things waiting in little bowls or tea cups–it makes me feel like I’m on a cooking show.

After the measuring and slicing and dicing, though, it was a very simple affair. Cook the whole spices a bit:

Then add the onion and hot pepper:

Then the potato and garlic:

Then the ground spices:

Then the spinach:

Finish off with garam masala, which for some reason is never supposed to be cooked for more than a minute.

Aside from some particularities about timing between steps (which I had to shorten significantly from the original recipe), that’s all there is. I think I doubled the amound of hot pepper, so it wound up quite spicy, but the flavor was amazing.

And best of all, I didn’t wind up with another plastic take-out container in my cabinets.

The Accidental Vegan

I am always surprised when I look down at my plate and I’ve made something vegan. My standard assessment of veganism is that I don’t believe in it, the same way that Mormons don’t believe in homosexuality. But just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Last night’s dinner, for example, the one I cooked while my little nephew in Durango cheered me on, contained absolutely no animal products. If I’d realized it at the time, I probably would have grated some parmesan on top, or cooked the veggies in some lard instead of oil. (No, that’s silly, the smoke point would be too high…) [addendum: I remembered later that I mixed in some fish sauce with the pasta dish, in lieu of a couple of anchovies. Not vegan. Whew.]

Anyway. Tonight’s dinner came very close to falling into the same trap, but was saved by honey.

Tonight, J. came over, for what is bound to be one of our last dinner-and-Alias nights, as she has made the decision to move to Washington, D.C. I hope we’ll have a bunch more dinners before the move, at least enough to finish watching season 1…

Our first course was Japanese Spinach with Sesame Dressing which is definitely one for the recipe box. (not an actual box) We subbed in mirin for saki because, guess what? That’s what I had. And it was delish.

Then, in an effort to make a dent in the stash of beets in my fridge, we did a version of Gingered Millet with Roasted Beets that also turned out pretty well, I think, and definitely increased my confidence in the beet-cooking department. I confess that I frequently buy those little French imported pouches of roasted, peeled baby beets, because cooking them is so daunting. I once tried to boil some and accidentally let the water boil off and almost ruined the pan. And gave myself a steam burn.

But thanks to this recipe, I now have better technique. It also helps to start with smallish beets. Scrub them, but leave on the tail and just the very end of the stems, and stick them in a baking dish with some water and a bit of salt. Then cover it up with parchment and a layer of foil (honestly not sure why both are necessary, but I’m not going to mess with something that works) and bake until they’re tender.

These were chiogga beets, a.k.a. candy-striped beets, which are not as striking as red ace beets but are still very pretty. Especially with wheat berries and yellow cherry tomatoes, and fresh basil and mint. The dressing has red wine vinegar, ginger, and honey (whew, not vegan).

I think I’m going to need to start planning a farewell dinner party for J. I know she wanted to learn to cook more vegetarian meals, but it’s probably going to involve some meat, because I will always think of her as a carnivore. Suggestions welcome.

Picnics and French Grand Opera

This past week, my dear friend P. drove all the way east from Cleveland just to visit little old me. Well, that’s not strictly true. Really he drove all that way so he could spend some time at the shore, which I totally understand. And also so we could head up to Bard together to see our friend A. sing in Les Huguenots.

Anyway, I figured that since he was doing all that driving, the least I could do would be to put together a little lunch for our road trip on Wednesday. I started off with this recipe for Cold Steamed Eggplant with Sesame Soy Dressing from the New York Times, and truth be told I did not vary from it very much. I did, however, substitute my summer spinach for the arugula, and decided to steam it because I don’t think summer spinach is terribly good raw. (In fact, I am getting the impression that it’s technically not spinach at all, though searching for “summer spinach” brings up mostly recipes for salad and not much information about the genus, so I’m still not entirely sure. Maybe I should petition the farm to send us linnaean taxonomy for everything they’re growing. Because that is how my particular brand of OCD manifests itself.)

In any case, you start out with some eggplant, and steam it in chunks.

Then you cut it up into smaller chunks, and toss it with salt & pepper and the dressing.

I steamed and chopped my pseudo-spinach, too, and added that to the mix. Stick in the fridge for a while, then add some chopped cilantro and slivers of bell pepper. Oh, and some sesame seeds. Serve with some bread (rosemary bread was maybe not an ideal complement, but J. had bought some from Amy’s and it smelled really good).

Eat, ideally, on a picnic bench near a concert hall designed by Frank Gehry.

Easy Peasy Weeknight Dinner

I think I spent more time looking at possible recipes for dinner tonight than I spent actually cooking.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to make some traditional Catalan-style spinach, so I bought some sultanas (aka golden raisins) and pine nuts, and then promptly ate that week’s spinach with something else and forgot about it. So tonight, in the midst of doing a couple of loads of laundry, while I was trying to figure out how to make a first dent in this week’s delivery, I remembered that plan. But it seemed like the Catalan elements would work better if I cooked them with the couscous. So here we go.

First, in goes the spinach in a big pan, just until wilted basically:

Then to prepare the couscous I wanted to serve it with:

I really can’t remember where I learned this (totally, completely non-traditional, will-get-you-punched-in-the-face-by-a-Moroccan) method of preparing couscous, but it’s awesome. Take some nuts, some dried fruit, a little salt, some olive oil (and whatever else you want–chopped herbs, shredded carrots, whatever), mix it all up with your hands in a bowl, then pour in some boiling water and cover it with a plate:

Oh, yeah, we need some protein, too. Good thing I’ve got those chickpeas in the fridge:

Toss the spinach back in:

I know the couscous LOOKS like a big boring beige mess, but trust me, it’s good:

And voila, dinner is served, and the laundry has still got 20 minutes to go in the dryer:

Catalan Spinach and Chickpeas with Couscous

1 bunch spinach (3/4 lb.)
1 c. chickpeas
2-3 cloves garlic, sliced
1/2 c. couscous
1/4 c. pine nuts
1/4 c. sultanas
salt
olive oil

Wash and trim the spinach, and put the leaves, still dripping, in a pan over medium heat. Cover, stirring occasionally, just until cooked. Remove to a strainer and set aside. Put on a kettle of water to boil.

Pour 1-2 Tbsp. olive oil in the same pan over medium heat again, and add the slices of garlic. Cook just until fragrant and lightly golden, then pull them out. Toss in the chickpeas and let cook while preparing the couscous.

In a heatproof bowl, combine the couscous, pine nuts, sultanas, cooked garlic, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/2 Tbsp. olive oil. Mix it all up with your hands (it’s messy, but it really works better). When the kettle boils, pour in 3/4 c. water, stir it all up, and cover the bowl with a plate. Let sit while finishing up the spinach.

Roughly chop the cooked spinach and add it to the pan with the chickpeas, and a little salt. Let it all warm through then turn off the heat.

Remove the plate from over the couscous and taste to see if it’s done. If there’s still water left, pour it off.

Serve the spinach on top of the couscous.

Ideas to Try

From the New York Times:

Sweet and Sour Cabbage With Tofu and Grains
Zucchini ‘Pasta’
Quinoa With Corn and Zucchini

From Smitten Kitchen:

Zucchini Bread

From 101 Cookbooks:

Lemony Chickpea Stir-fry Recipe (with spinach instead of kale)