Category: In the Kitchen

I have hated celery for years. As a child, I never liked any of the standard 1970s snack preparations: celery stick with peanut butter, celery stick with cream cheese, celery stick with dip. BLECH.
Readers of this site may recall that in recent years I have come to enjoy celery, even raw celery, in certain preparations — notably the celery and pressed tofu salad in certain Chinese restaurants. (RIP Wing’s Kitchen *sob*)
With this newly-opened mind, I decided that for my most recent cocktail party I’d put my oft-used green-olive cream cheese spread into celery sticks for a fancier presentation. I tried piping it with a big star tip but that was a non-starter so I snipped the end off the ziplock and piped it that way. Much more successful, if perhaps a little more rustic than I’d imagined. I figured other people would like it, but I’d probably not dig it so much.
WRONG.
The olive-pimento-parsley flavors in the cream cheese are great with the savory celery. The whole thing is like a crunchy martini in your mouth. Love them, and have been eating a couple before starting dinner prep every night this week. Yum!
Who knew?

mmmmm… mashed potato and celery root with butter and salt and pepper and just the littlest bit of milk. diet-ish food that is SO tasty.

Yesterday it was rainy and I felt like having a tuna melt and some Campbell’s tomato soup. So I did. And the odd thing was that I put celery — actual raw celery — into my tuna salad. Voluntarily. Those of you who know me know that this DOES NOT HAPPEN.
Now, I will grant you that it was minced up REALLY small, because there is just no universe in which large chunks of raw celery have any place in a tuna salad. *shudder* But for a melt, my usual relish didn’t seem right. I wanted the diner-style tuna melt that I have so often had at greasy spoons… and those always have celery in ’em. So I went for it, making sure to mince up my celery nice and small. And it’s true — the celery tastes good in there, if your tuna salad happens to be consorting with melty cheese and crispy butter toast.
Open minds are fun.

The new issue of Gourmet had lots of excellent recipes for produce that was already burning a hole in my pocket, so I went on a cooking bender today. (Gourmet’s A-Z concept issue, btw, is all the things that the Saveur 100 used to be, or at least close enough. Sigh.)
Anyway, for future reference:
– grated zucchini salted, drained, squoze, then sauteed in butter and garlic and topped with bread crumbs fried in butter with lemon rind and thyme
– green / yellow beans cooked then rewarmed in olive oil and garlic, salt and pepper, and then tossed with lemon rind and shredded basil
– a wine and lemon verbena gelee with summer berries
All came from Gourmet and were clever little things I hadn’t thought of on my own. I used lemon balm instead of verbena, and like a dumbass only had half the gelatin needed, so it may turn out runny, but it seemed like a tasty idea with blueberries and blackberries, and a nice way to use up marginal berries without really cooking them. I always like a new idea for beans, and this one is a very nice flavor, but the beans were old ones and they’re a little tough for this preparation. The zucchini came out awesome, and I may grate all my zucchini for cooking henceforward.
I also grilled up a bunch of yellow crookneck and red onion with my steak tips tonight, just to have them around. I also roasted one of the anaheim chilies from the parental plants. Earlier today I made a gazpacho with tomato juice, cubanelle and cucumber, and I may have to do that one again. Ditto the new corn salad I made up — with edamame and vinegared cucumber and chives and lemon thyme. Yums.

I made a blueberry sorbet this week, with the 800 shitloads of blueberries from the parental homestead, and I thought that it might be nice to use a red wine for the alcohol — something about those flavors seemed like it might be complementary.
This simple recipe seemed pretty good, but I followed this recipe with the following exceptions:
– no egg white
– used red wine + a splash of water in place of the water
– i screwed up and used 2x the water called for, ie nearly 1 cup of wine + the splash of water
And astonishingly, it came out tasting great. I gave some to my parents without telling them anything about the recipe, and they said it had intense blueberry flavor. Yay!
(it was a sonoma cabernet sauvignon for whatever that is worth, and i cooked the wine and sugar for a little while, to reduce volume and deepen the flavor a little)

I can’t help it, my lunch today was just too good not to share.
I had a ribeye that I bought on sale this week and needed to cook soon, and a batch of that hungarian dill zucchini. So I grilled the ribeye, and made a salad with spinach, frisee and radish. And I threw a garden cuke, a leftover cubanelle pepper, some chives, garlic and tomato juice into the food processor with a little olive oil, sherry vinegar, salt, pepper and just a wee speck of cumin to make gazpacho.
Cold gazpacho, hot fatty ribeye, plus a tangy salad of bitter greens, spicy radish, and enough of that zucchini to basically serve as a dressing. Not bad for a workday. AND I didn’t resort to starch, so aside from the pedantic argument that beef fat is perhaps not entirely dietetic, good for me too!

While we were in NYC, tallasiandude got this old family recipe anecdotally from a friend. We tried it last night and it’s really great. So all y’all out there with too many zucchini, try this:
Grate the zucchini on a box grater — one smallish zucchini was barely enough for two to have small portions, so go wild.
Put the grated zucchini into a skillet with a little bit of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, and cook it until just tender. Stir occasionally especially as the water evaporates, so it won’t burn.
Put the cooked zucchini into a dish. Grind over some pepper, and sprinkle with equal parts rice wine vinegar and either wine vinegar or cider vinegar. You can add as much vinegar as you want, but I’d advise going light or else it’ll be swimming in liquid. Chop up some fresh dill and stir in.
You could eat it right away or let it cool down in the fridge. Either way, it’s like a salad or a pickle, with a fresh dilliness and a bit of richness from the oil. It makes a nice change from the usual steamed or fried or grilled squash.

There’s no pictures, because I couldn’t cope with the camera, but last night we had a fun little gathering for our pal’s birthday and had a bunch of middle-eastern/turkish-style treats. Some came from Sofra, and were dreamy as usual: beet-yogurt-walnut, smoky eggplant, red pepper-pomegranate, kidney bean-walnut, and something we think was based on fava beans.
But Sofra for a big group can get expensive, so I got out the Claudia Roden book and went nuts for a couple of hours. I love this book so much — easy, easy vegetable recipes full of addictive flavors.
I made:
– spiced carrot puree (lots of hot smoked paprika, cumin, coriander, etc)
– celeriac-almond hummus (idea stolen from sofra)
– greek yogurt with salted cucumber dice and dried mint
– chickpeas in garlic-lemon-olive oil dressing with parsley
– smashed zucchini with garlic, raisins and pinenuts (so insanely good)
– white turnip and orange salad with olive oil and black pepper
– radishes pickled in lemon juice and olive oil (they turn a lovely hot pink)
– baba ganoush
and there was also feta and labneh and fresh herbs and breads from Sevan Bakery in Watertown, and watermelon with feta and mint, and MG’s curry turkey burger sliders with mango chutney. I just cannot get enough of this kind of food. It makes me so happy. YUM.
(post script: lemon/olive oil radish pickles are really really good mixed in with the chickpeas in lemon, garlic and parsley. just sayin’.)

My dad gave me a bunch of his spring onions from the garden, and I thought it would be nice to grill them as they do in Spain, and serve them with some romesco sauce… as they do in Spain.
They came out rather good, really, delicious even on their own without the sauce, picking up a nutty smoky aspect in just a few minutes on the flames. They only need to be on there, over a moderate heat, for long enough to soften and go brown in spots. I put mine so that the white parts were on the hot part where the steak was cooking, with the green parts trailing off to the colder part of the grill, which worked beautifully.
The romesco sauce was loosely based on this recipe but really turned out to be:
1 roasted red pepper
5 or 6 big grape tomatoes, raw
slice of wheat toast
1 large clove garlic (should have been more but I ran out)
big handful of slivered almonds
sprinkle of salt
hot paprika, smoked paprika, and some crushed red pepper flakes
glugs of olive oil and sherry vinegar to make it smooth and runny
Being lazy as you know, I just ran all that together in the food processor to make a sauce. Lovely!
And because it really is springtime, solstice notwithstanding, we also had peas and white turnips braised in butter. I cooked the turnip and older peas in salted butter and water, then threw in the younger peas once it was well cooled down with only a little residual heat. Delicious, though perhaps a little too delicate a companion for the romesco… but you cook what you got.