Category: In the Kitchen

This is my version of the classic recipe, which has been vetted as authentic by our Italian-American food-bigot friend Victor, who views any not-Italian food with suspicion at best. It is definitely one of those recipes where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Ingredients:
1 onion, sliced
2 -3 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
generous amount olive oil to saute (I use extra virgin, as I think it tastes nice)
head of escarole or other bitter green
can of chicken broth
can of white beans
salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste
Saute sliced onion in olive oil till softened, then add garlic slices and saute those till softened (use enough oil so they don’t get dry or hard, or burn while you’re sauteeing the greens). Add sliced up head of escarole, or other bitter green, and saute until wilted and fairly soft — you want them pretty well sauteed before you add liquid, at least for escarole, because it tempers the bitterness. Add some pepper and red pepper flakes, if you like. Add a can of chicken broth. Braise a good long time till the greens are getting silky soft and delicious, then add a drained & rinsed can of white beans, and braise a little longer to flavor them up and blend everything (the broth thickens up just a hair from the bean starch). Cover at any point if you think the broth is disappearing too quickly. Salt to taste.
It’s just lovely as it is, with some bread and cheese as accompaniment, but you can also add chicken sausage or other cooked meat to make a heartier stew-like dish. The key is to not wuss out on cooking the greens longer than you may think is strictly necessary, at both the saute and braise stages, because when they get all soft and olive green, that’s when they taste most delicious. (I would even make so bold as to suggest that this might be the sort of thing that Marcella Hazan has in mind when she talks about insaporire as the wellspring of Italian food’s astounding yumminess. Roughly translated it means “to make flavorful,” and the general idea is to cook your aromatics (onion, celery, carrot, peppers, whatever) slowly in fat, building up layers of caramelization and flavors, before firing up the heat and adding the ingredient which is intended to be ‘insaporato’: given the flavor you just lovingly built up in the supporting ingredients. I think the beans are the target in a greens-n-beans recipe like this.)

For some reason, our garden cantaloupes have been starting to mold before they are fully ripe, so in order to deal with the mangled chunks of yummy but none-too-sweet ripe melon, I made them into sorbet. Taking a tip from the strawberry sorbet I had at Jiraffe in LA, I put some sauternes in with the melon and sugar. Holy cow! Just like the strawberry, the melon is pushed right over the edge into glory by that wine’s sweetness and floral overtones. The alcohol also helps keep the texture soft and velvety, rather than icy. I ate some every day for a week, and there’s still some left, which I think I might go eat right now. Oh, how I love the sweet fruity desserts!
(though still, as good as this melon sorbet is, the All-Time Best Fruity Dessert Ever prize still belongs to the lime sherbet made this spring. Hot damn.)

Original (low-brow) food bucket: Kraft Mac & Cheese, Hormel canned chili, hot dogs. Ideally cooked over a campfire. Intensely satisfying hike food.
High-brow food bucket: Homemade mac with real melty cheeses, homemade chili with ground meat and beans and tomatoes and spiciness, hot dogs. Usually made at home. Tastes great, of course, because of all yummy ingredients especially including cheese. But somehow wrong, contrary to the spirit of food bucket.
Enter last night’s last-minute dinner: Annie’s white mac & cheese, Stagg fancy-pants meaty canned chili from Costco, a handful of aged cheddar, chopped fresh tomato. No dogs, b/c the chili has lots of meat. It has the proper spirit, of cans and powdered cheese mix, but it tastes great because of the tiny bit of real cheese and higher-quality foundations. Mmmm…

Been tickled by this ever since I put some goat cheese into a bowl of pasta, only to have it completely melt and coat the pasta with creamy tangy goodness.
Newest entry, and something you can only really do in summer with the good produce: Cut kernels from one cob leftover corn. Dice up a big fat tomato. Mix together, add pepper & salt, and a couple of slices of chevre, ideally with some herb on it, like chive. The cheese melts in with the tomato juices and makes a creamy dressing.
(Note from 8/31: this works just as well with very sharp cheddar, though it doesn’t melt so much. Added steamed green beans and some hot pepper flakes too. Yum.)

At the Newton farmers market today, I bought some pea tendrils and dill from the Hmong Farms stand. The nice lady there got very excited and told me that she often sautees both those things *together*, with a little garlic, which I thought a little weird but kind of intriguing. So I did it. I kinda like it, though it doesn’t taste very asian; more like english peas with dill. Tallasiandude is a purist, though, and it’s not his cup of tea.

Further adventures of cookery with hedge:
Spanish dinner of seared local wild scallops on wilted frisee, followed by pan-seared local wild hake with parsley/garlic/lemon sauce (hake=yum, even tallasiandude likes it), minted basmati rice, more green bean/walnut salad, and sliced tomatoes.
Deep South breakfast of tall buttermilk biscuits (from Cook’s Illustrated, yummy and easy), mustard greens in ham hock broth, scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, homemade marmalade, and homemade dill pickles.
Breakfast #2 of more biscuits, New Zealand rata & manuka honey, fried eggs and bacon, tea, and sliced tomatoes with scalloped tomato & fried crumbs.
What a vacation she had: sleep, read, go to food markets, cook, eat, repeat. Yeah!

Apparently one must have a party of several dozen in order to hold a clambake on the beach; no one does it for small parties. A couple of places have big clambake pavilions where smaller groups can go and join in, but these do not appear to a) be on the beach or, more importantly, b) use seaweed in the cooking. Thus thwarted, Hedge and I turned to the DIY solution. She was going to Marblehead anyway to visit folks, so we called ahead to arrange for some rockweed, steamers and lobsters to be ready for pickup, and we cooked those suckers right here at home.

Rockweed is essential for the proper clambake flavor. I put a bunch in my roasting pan, put the clammies on top, and covered with more rockweed and a couple of cups of water. The pan fit nicely inside the gas grill with the grills removed, and 30 minutes later, gorgeous fresh salty steamers and littlenecks (steamers on the right in photo, with bigger shells & much messier bodies to eat, but most delicious, i think). The 6 of us put away 8 pounds of clams, along with 4.5 lobsters and a groaning board of side dishes. (The remaining 1.5 lobsters became lobster salad for this morning’s breakfast, along with bread fried in leftover lobstery butter and some of those tasty dill horseradish pickles. Mmm.)
We put some rockweed in the lobster boil as well, along with a tablespoon or so of kosher salt. Lacking enough burners and a big enough kettle, we nuked the corn and pan-boiled the potatoes the usual way rather than attempting to get them in there with the sea critters. Caramelized zucchini & onions w/ thyme, long beans w/ walnut oil and walnuts, garden tomato & mozzarella salad w/ wild arugula were all amazing; the garlicky slaw somehow didn’t go with the other flavors as well as i hoped it would, though it was tasty in and of itself.
Gooseberry-raspberry tart was yummy too, though well into my second piece I discovered that tangy tart filling mixed with vanilla ice cream makes a wonderful creamy treat on its own, sort of like a berry fool.
This was the first time hedge, littlelee, spleen & I all cooked together, and I must say it was a beautiful thing, a well-oiled machine of ad hoc cookery.

Tonight’s impromptu dinner party was a triumph of leftover usage. Half a log of goat cheese, half a jar of roasted red pepper, and 4 of the !@#$% zucchini went into the pasta. The bag of plums & pluots that I hadn’t had time for became the plum tart I’ve been meaning to make for a year. And the half-bag of multigrain pita chips and whole-wheat loaf-end were perfect with white bean dip. Yay, me. *giggle*
Notes: multigrain sesame pita chips from Trader Joe’s are delicious. And the bean dip ended up being white beans, chickpeas, rosemary (which gets stronger over time, note to self), parsley, garlic, lemon, hot sauce, salt, pepper, olive oil, and a bit of red wine vinegar. (It needed tanginess.) I love, LOVE my immersion blender.

What to do with that cup of onion juice? Use it to steam up a bag of baby carrots with salt & pepper, then stick the immersion blender in there and whiz them up with buttermilk. Mix in snipped dill, serve cold. Yum yum. Low fat, low maintenance, highly tasty. It would probably even go nicely as a first course with the kebab kubideh, though if you haven’t so generated onion juice you could probably just steam some onion in with the carrots.

Another armload of cucumbers this week, so in addition to the 4 jars of russian horseradish-dill pickles, I just made another big batch of pickles using my uncle’s special pickling-spice mix. They smell awesome. (His mix is mustard seeds, dill seeds, broken-up bay leaves, allspice, cloves, and hot peppers, from what I can tell.) So I’ve got pickles up the wazoo — good thing I really like pickles. Also palming a few off onto pickle-loving friends…

Continue reading “PickleFest 2004 (duuude)”