Raw Foods

This recipe calls for kohlrabi.

I was positive that I’d seen some in the greenmarket recently, but then I didn’t quite make it there during the day. So I stopped at Agata and Valentina, which usually has just about everything (including, somehow, rhubarb well into the summer and fall, which is suspicious), but it was nowhere to be seen. 

So standing there in the produce aisle, wondering, “Now what am I going to make with those pea shoots?” I remembered a scene from Christmas at my mom’s house a few years ago. A traditional hors d’oeuvres in my family (the Austrian side, anyway) is peeled sliced kohlrabi sprinkled with a little salt. One year, though, my uncle brought in a plate of turnips, prepared the same way. He neglected (ahem) to tell my mom, and she didn’t notice the difference. And I figured if she couldn’t tell, then there was no point to informing her. (Sorry, Mom.) So I thought to myself, “Why can’t I just swap in a turnip again?”

Meanwhile, back home, I had finally located the julienne blade to my mandoline. After the requisite rejoicing, and after a few misguided attempts at using it without reading the instructions (um…) I found myself with a lovely bowl of vegetable matchsticks. I was a little hesitant about feeding anyone else raw turnips, no matter how finely julienned, but I think it turned out ok. Though truthfully, next time I’m going to hold out for actual kohlrabi. And/or I also might try this similar recipe, with a sesame dressing. The fennel/sesame oil/rice vinegar combo called for in the one I made is very light, and I think the turnips kind of overpowered it. Or else I wound up with too high a ratio of vegetable to dressing.

In a related note, if anyone has something that needs to be julienned, just give me a call. I have an urge to julienne everything in sight. Greatest kitchen gadget since the little spoonrest/holder that clips onto the side of the pot while you’re cooking. (Thanks to T. for that one.)

For the Love of Harissa

I have been craving harissa lately. Harissa is a Tunisian condiment, common all over North Africa (and beyond). It is sweet and spicy and rich with olive oil and hot chile peppers. Try it on bread, eggs, vegetables, meat–I’ve even seen it used on pasta. Much like chimichurri in South America or sriracha in Southeast Asia, there are dozens upon dozens of variations, both homemade and available commercially. You may well have your own favorite recipe or brand; mine is from David Tanis’s book A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes. It’s got fennel, caraway, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and garlic. And I’ve had a serious yen for it the last few weeks. Luckily, my spice cabinet is very well stocked, so made up a batch the other night–and then had to figure out what to eat with it.

Something drew me to the combination of harissa and turnips. I’ve found turnips to be a little astringent in the past–I can’t help thinking of horseradish when I cut them up.  So I thought roasting them (with some other vegetables) would bring out some sweetness, and then drizzling with harissa would add a welcome bass note to the flavor profile of the dish.

“Other vegetables” ended up being carrots, Carnival squash, and beets. I wasn’t sure how beets and harissa would do together, but since it seems some recipes for harissa include pureed beets, I figured it would turn out ok.

While the veggies roasted (with a couple cloves of garlic, some thyme, a bay leaf, and a dried chile pepper), I cooked up a pot of bulgur. This involves boiling some water, dumping in the bulgur, turning off the heat, and leaving to sit (covered) until the rest of the meal is ready. It’s that easy, as Ina would say. You can use stock, too, if you like. I did not, but I added the same aromatics as I did to the veggies–bay, thyme, dried chile. And then when it was properly soaked, I drained it and mixed in some fresh parsley and mint.

By that time, the veggies were all nicely roasted. Note that many recipes for “roasted root vegetables” advise you to cut everything into roughly equal-sized pieces. This is not actually the best way to go, in my mind, in retrospect. Carrots are nice when there is still a little crunch to them. Turnips cook quicker than beets, and both must be cooked all the way through to be enjoyable. Sweet potatoes would be nice, but I had winter squash, and that cooks faster than anything else in the baking dish. Just something to think about for next time.

In the end, this is basically a salad: grain + vegetable + dressing. Normally I don’t bother to write about such simple meals, but there’s so much good flavor in this one that I’m making an exception.

Roasted Vegetables with Bulgur and Harissa
serves 4

1/2 lb each of:
    turnips
    carrots
    beets
    winter squash (or whatever sturdy vegetables you like and have on hand)
2 garlic cloves, lightly smashed and peeled
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
2 dried chile peppers
1 c bulgur
2 c water
2 Tbsp parsley, chopped
1 Tbsp mint, chopped
olive oil
salt
fresh ground pepper
harissa, to taste (Tanis’s recipe is available here, among other places–or use your own)

Preheat the oven to 400F.
Peel the vegetables and cut them into roughly bite-sized pieces, going a little smaller on tougher things like beets and larger on things that cook faster, like winter squash. Toss them into a baking dish with some olive oil, salt, the garlic cloves, 1 thyme sprig, 1 bay leaf, and 1 dried pepper. Roast for 25-35 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked to your liking.
Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a saucepan. Pour in a teaspoon or two of salt, and then the bulgur, along with the remaining thyme, bay, and pepper. Turn off the heat and slap a lid on the pot. Let it sit, 15-20 minutes, until the bulgur has absorbed all (or most) of the water. If there’s still water left in the pot when the texture of the grain is right, strain it through a sieve. Then stir in the chopped parsley and mint.
Pick out the aromatics from both the bulgur and the veggies, and combine in a big bowl. Serve with as much harissa as you like.

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…

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.