New Year, New Soup, New Vegetable

Chestnut Soup

590g chestnuts in the shell
310g halved & sliced leeks (2 large)
90ml butter
235ml white wine
745g cubed acorn squash (2 small)
1.3L vegetable stock
115ml whole milk
salt & pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400ºF; with a paring knife, make an X on the flat side of each chestnut. Lay chestnuts, X-side up, in a single layer on an ungreased baking sheet. Roast 15 minutes, until fragrant; peel off shells and inner skins. (If peeling the chestnuts is troublesome, or some cool off too much to be easy to peel, put them in a bowl, rinse with water, and microwave for 1 minute.) Melt butter in a soup pot over medium heat; add leeks and sauté 4 minutes. Add wine; simmer 3 minutes. Add squash, chestnuts and stock. Cover pot and increase heat to high to quickly bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat to medium (or low-medium), partially cover pot and simmer 20 minutes, until squash is tender. Stir in milk; let soup cool slightly. Purée until smooth; season with salt and pepper. Serve hot.

Yield: 2.6L
Cooking time: 180 minutes
Vegetarian: yes
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 27 December 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Chestnuts & squash – Whole Foods (4530 40^th Street NW)
Leeks – Cal-Organic (Bakersfield, CA)
Butter – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Wine (sauvignon blanc) – Kenwood (Sonoma County, CA)
Stock – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Milk – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)

Comments:
Every now and then, I decide to try a new ingredient, usually a certain vegetable that I’ve seen frequently but never cooked with. This season that ingredient is chestnuts. And no, I wasn’t inspired by the Christmas carol. I was more inspired by a weird confluence of two facts: chestnuts’ current ubiquity, and then seeing no one buy those two-pound bags of them at the grocery store. Because, let’s face it, would you know how to prepare a chestnut if you had one?

I certainly didn’t know before I started. I didn’t really know once I’d started either. I had a few notes, but I found myself looking at YouTube videos about how to peel chestnuts while I was making this soup. (Hence the somewhat long prep time. If you know what you’re doing, I doubt this soup takes three hours.) The instructions you see here reflect my newly-acquired wisdom on roasting and peeling chestnuts, not what I did in making this soup, which involved considerably more poking of my fingers with a paring knife than I expected in order to get the shells off.

(I do recommend having more than one pound of chestnuts on hand when you make this soup, particularly if you’re new to chestnuts like me. This is because a few of them will be recalcitrant enough when you peel them that you’ll be left with too much “inner shell” to use them.)

These travails aside, this soup is actually a gentle way to introduce oneself to what chestnuts can do. I’ve been curious about chestnuts since I went to Paris and saw chestnut-flavored everything in patisseries. Because crème de marron (or crème de châtaigne) was probably one of the most popular flavors of pastries that I saw, behind chocolate and ahead of coffee. This soup shows you the savory side of chestnuts. I’ve yet to really experiment with what they’re capable of in desserts. (I didn’t eat chestnut-flavored pastries in France because I was too busy sampling all the unbelievably delicious chocolate ones.)

The problem with prep taking so long here is that I was too tired to take the extra step of preparing the garnish. Brother Victor suggests setting aside some of the peeled chestnuts to be sautéed and crumbled. I definitely thought this was a good idea—before I’d spent over two hours roasting and peeling all the chestnuts, and then peeling and dicing the squash (which takes a long time in its own right). After that, I wasn’t up to do so, since I had another soup to make afterwards.

Anyway, I very much enjoyed this soup. It feels mild and light on the tongue, but the flavor is rich. Probably thanks to all that butter. The squash brings a very light overtone of sweetness, while the chestnuts really provide the depth, density and—dare I say—nuttiness to the taste. This soup almost made me a fan of purees again. (As in, the uniform texture didn’t bug me as much as it usually does.) But the soup did make me a fan of chestnuts, not least because occasionally I’d run into a remarkably tender piece of chestnut that escaped the food processor blade. There’s something luxurious about them, and I must find more recipes for them.

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Brava Soup

For the Brava Sauce:
440ml crushed tomatoes
60ml olive oil
30ml red wine
4 tsp pimentòn
1 tsp superfine sugar
2 seeded & minced serranos

For the Osso Buco Mix:
grated zest of 1 lemon
3 large sage leaves
2 tsp rosemary leaves
2 tsp thyme leaves
3 crushed garlic cloves
10 large quartered green olives

For the Soup:
15ml olive oil
115g cured chorizo, thinly sliced
190g diced onion (1 medium)
4g minced garlic (1 clove)
220g diced celery (4 ribs)
180g diced carrots (10 small)
530g peeled & diced russet potatoes (2 large)
120ml red wine
145g chopped kale (1 small bunch)
945ml chicken stock
salt & pepper to taste
lemon juice to taste
oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, well-drained, patted dry & chopped

For the brava sauce: purée all ingredients in a food processor. For the osso buco mix: purée all ingredients in a food processor. For the soup: heat oil in a pot set over medium-high heat. Once hot, add chorizo; sauté 2 minutes to let it render its fat and begin to crisp. Add onion; sauté 3 minutes, until translucent. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute. Add celery and carrots; sauté 1-2 minutes, until beginning to soften. Add wine; simmer 5 minutes, until at least half the liquid is evaporated. Add osso buco mix, stirring well; add kale, stirring to wilt for 1 minute. Stir in brava sauce, followed by stock; add potatoes. Partially cover pot and cook 20 minutes, letting soup come to a boil, until vegetables are tender. Season to taste with salt, pepper and up to 1 lemon’s worth of juice. Serve hot, garnished with sun-dried tomatoes.

Yield: 2.5L
Cooking time: 120 minutes
Vegetarian: no
Source: me!
Date prepared: 27 December 2014
Rating: ****

Sources:
Crushed tomatoes – Furmano’s (Northumberland, PA)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Wine – Chianti Classico DOCG, Rocca della Maciè, Famiglia Zingarelli (Tuscany, Italy)
Pimentòn – Safinter, Valgosa (Barcelona, Spain)
Serranos – King’s Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Lemon, sage, rosemary, thyme, garlic, olives, onion & potatoes – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Chorizo – Embutidos Palacios (La Rioja, Spain)
Celery – Dole (Westlake Village, CA)
Carrots – Earthbound Farm (San Juan Bautista, CA)
Kale – Whole Foods (4530 40^th Street NW)
Stock – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Sun-dried tomatoes – Jeff’s Naturals (American Canyon, CA)

Comments:
Yes indeedy, this is a soup that I created. I’m very proud of myself.

How did this come about? Well, before I left for my Christmas vacation, I made some oven fries. More importantly, I made too much of a dipping sauce for said oven fries, and I was searching for something to do with the leftovers (besides serving it as a dip again). In fact, the dipping sauce gives the soup its name. The sauce is called brava, and it’s usually served alongside twice-fried and seasoned potatoes—a classic Spanish dish called patatas bravas.

Given that brava sauce is mostly crushed tomatoes, I thought of treating it like canned tomato sauce and building a soup around that. The question then became what everything else in the soup would be.

I initially thought of a variation on pasta fazool, the Italian soup that features both pasta and beans. My original idea would have featured both fusilli and potatoes (to use up some more leftovers from  the oven fries). But ultimately I just went with the potatoes.

I also decided to continue playing the Spanish theme, and that led me to use cured (i.e., Spanish-style) chorizo as the soup’s base. (I did look for a small bottle of Spanish wine, but couldn’t find any.) Between that and the brava sauce, this soup became quite spicy. Not inedibly so, but I do recommend having some bread, olives or cheese on hand to help cut the heat. (I should mention that the brava sauce had been in the freezer for awhile, and then defrosted. I don’t remember it being this hot when I first made it, so I guess the serranos really infused the whole mix, thus turning up the heat.) Feel free to use more chorizo if you like your soups to make your nose run; I only added about half of a not-quite eight-ounce sausage.

Most of the other veggies featured are typical of a soup, such as onions, garlic, celery and carrots. I added the kale to use up a bunch from the previous night’s dinner (see below).

The other unique component to this soup is the “osso buco mix.” It comes from a soup of Brother Victor, which I made in 2010—the year before I started this blog—and which I thought was utterly delicious. Not least because it featured a full bottle of white wine. I thought of it when I decided that something sour and tart should go in the soup. Why did I decide that? Well, basically at this point I’d realized that, except for the chorizo, I was making something of a Bloody Mary soup. And I always love a wedge of lemon on my Bloodies. Sour things in general tend to go well with tomatoes, and I thought they might temper the spice somewhat. The sun-dried tomato garnish continued the tart tomato theme.

The result of these disparate inspirations was a remarkably delicious soup. It had an immense amount of flavor, with the spice, sourness and vegetal sweetness merging together quite harmoniously (and singing forte to boot). The kale and chorizo kept the soup savory, with the latter also providing a fair amount of heft and richness. This is not a gentle soup, which is just fine with me. Everything about it is in your face, and I wanted it to be that way.

I definitely plan on making this again, if only because I made when my husband was traveling and so I want him to try this. I’ll adjust it a bit for his tastes (such as leaving out the greens, of which he’s not a fan). And I still think it could work with pasta, so you may see that in the future. This is a soup, after all, so it’s flexible. But I’m happy to add the invention of this recipe to my list of cooking accomplishments.

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Open-Faced Breakfast Sandwich

2 halved English muffins
1 tbsp butter
4 tbsp smoky onion mustard
8 oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, drained
4 slices cooked bacon, broken in half
4 cheddar slices (small, but thick-cut)

Preheat oven to broil; butter each English muffin half. Spread each with 1 tbsp mustard, then top each with 2 sun-dried tomatoes, a slice of bacon and a slice of cheese. Place sandwiches on a baking sheet; broil 5” from heat element for 4 minutes, until cheese melts and is bubbly. Serves 2.

Sources:
English muffins – Breadfurst (4434 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Butter – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Smoky onion mustard – National Mustard Museum (Middleton, WI)
Tomatoes – Jeff’s Naturals (Napa Valley, CA)
Bacon – Nature’s Promise (Landover, MD)
Cheddar – Gourmet Foods International (Atlanta, GA)

Comments:
Quick and easy, these are immensely tasty breakfast sandwiches. They’re a reminder why I should make breakfasts more often. (I usually don’t for a few reasons: I do all the grocery shopping on Saturday morning, and that can take so long I don’t feel like cooking when I get back; and I’m usually so up to my neck in cooking for the week on Sunday morning that starting something else is problematic, to say the least.) These sandwiches are simple and straightforward enough that I could put something like this together even at my busiest.

The recipe comes from the National Mustard Museum’s website. As with the mustard spice cake, I was poking around the site to find ideas for using a particular mustard—in this case, the smoky onion mustard, another gift of the Mustard of the Month Club. And while the recipe is simple enough, I’m not sure I could have figured it out on my own. Not least because I tend not to think of having mustard for breakfast. This sandwich made me rethink all that.

But the combination of flavors and ingredients here works wonders. The smoky mustard complements the smoke in the bacon, and the sun-dried tomatoes provide a slightly sweeter (and more tart) note to break up all the saltiness. Throw on some creamy cheddar and you have yourself a small, but delectable, feast. The sandwiches, in fact, are rich enough that two halves of an English muffin are quite sufficient for a meal. For that, you can thank the mustard: it’s a gigantic flavor kick in a small package.

(I also find it helps to have some real English muffins—not the cardboard storebought crap. Quite happily, you can get wonderfully dense and tasty ones from Breadfurst. They stand up to the rich toppings here, as well they should.)

I should note that these sandwiches can be rather dehydrating, thanks to all the salt and rich tastes. But that’s in part due to my swapping sun-dried tomatoes for fresh. I did that for the obvious reason: tomatoes are not in season, and I refuse to put a pale, chalky slice of tomato on a respectable sandwich. If you want to use fresh tomatoes, once they’re back in season, place a slice on top of the mustard, followed by the bacon and cheese. You’ll get a juicier sandwich, and that’d definitely be worth trying. I’ll probably give it a whirl next summer, since this sandwich is certainly worth having again and again.

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Penne al Verdure con Salsiccia e Balsamico

1 lb uncased & crumbled hot Italian sausage (4 links)
1 small diced white onion
2 minced garlic cloves
1/2 cup vegetable broth
1 cup broccolini florets
1 cup diced kale
1/3 cup chopped black olives (about 14)
15oz tomato sauce
15oz crushed tomatoes
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
4 tbsp minced basil
2 tbsp dried marjoram
cracked black pepper to taste
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 lb dried penne, cooked until al dente & drained
grated parmesan (garnish)

Heat a large pot over medium heat until hot; add sausage and cook 4 minutes, until fat is rendered. Add onion; cook 2 minutes. Add garlic; cook 1 minute. Stir in broccolini, kale, broth and olive; cook 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes and vinegar; simmer 10-15 minutes, letting sauce reduce, until vegetables are tender. Remove from heat; stir in basil, marjoram, black pepper, crushed red pepper and salt. Toss with penne, then serve hot, garnished with parmesan.

Sources:
Sausage, kale, olives & marjoram – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Onion, garlic & basil – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Broth – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Broccolini – Earthbound Farm (San Juan Bautista, CA)
Tomato sauce & crushed tomatoes – Furmano’s (Northumberland, PA)
Vinegar – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Black pepper – Williams-Sonoma (San Francisco, CA)
Crushed red pepper – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)
Penne – De Cecco (Fara San Martino, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy)
Parmesan – SarVecchio, Sartori (Plymouth, WI)

Comments:
I forget where I found this recipe, but I’m sure glad I did, because it’s quite lovely. If it makes any sense to say this, you can sort of think of this as a salad in sauce form, thanks to the presence of broccolini, kale, olives and balsamic. The latter two provide this sauce with a few sour notes that tend not to show up in traditional tomato-based pasta sauces. The former added a very subtle note of bitterness, which I appreciated for its ability to take the edge off the heat from the sausage and crushed red pepper. (My husband thought the bitterness was almost too strong for him—i.e., strong but not so much as to prevent him from eating seconds. He tends not to like bitter greens, and may be more sensitive to the flavor they impart to salads and other dishes. I tend to love them, however).

The broccolini is a particularly interesting addition. For one thing, I admit that I used it instead of regular broccoli, which is what the recipe had asked for. I made the switch because the broccolini felt a bit more apropos, since it acts as sort of both a vegetable and a green. (It also comes in smaller bunches, making leftovers less likely.) The broccolini also really brings out the vegetal sweetness of the tomatoes, again to act as a foil for the sausage and crushed red pepper.

(And while we’re speaking of substitutions, I swapped the called-for oregano for marjoram, since Whole Foods was out of the classic Italian herb. Marjoram certainly has its unique aroma, which lent itself well to the salad-y nature of the sauce.)

Without the additions of more unusual ingredients like these, this would be your standard pasta sauce with sausage. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Indeed, that kind of sauce is one of my favorite things in the world to eat. On the other hand, olives are a classic addition to puttanesca sauce, and there are plenty of pasta dishes that feature greens. So maybe some of these additions aren’t so unusual after all.

The ultimate effect on the eater of this pasta sauce is something like the kitchen sink. There’s a lot in this sauce, so you needn’t worry that the presence of rabbit food will make it any less rich. I think the presence of all the veggies on top of the Italian sausage makes the sauce that much richer, since so many more ingredients get to infuse it. (I suppose you could call this “V8 Sauce,” à la the juice.) So toss a generous amount with some pasta, and have yourself a feast!

Seasonal Ice Cream & a Protein Boost

Soupe aux Pois Chiches à la Provençale

60ml olive oil
340g uncased & crumbled loukaniko sausage (4 links)
510g halved & sliced leeks (4 large)
20g minced garlic (4 large cloves)
200g chopped celery (4 ribs)
1.9L vegetable stock
1kg canned & drained chickpeas (from 4 cans)
145g chopped spinach
2g dried thyme
2g dried rosemary
2g dried oregano
2 fresh bay leaves
salt & pepper to taste
20ml salted butter

Put oil in a soup pot and set the pot over medium-high heat. Once oil is hot, add sausage and cook 2 minutes, breaking up large chunks with the cooking spoon. Add leeks; sauté 3 minutes. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute. Add celery and cook 1 minute. Add stock, followed by chickpeas, spinach and herbs. Cover and cook 15 minutes, letting the soup come to a boil. Season with salt and pepper to taste; add butter and let melt, stirring, for 2 minutes. Serve hot.

Yield: 4L
Cooking time: 85 minutes
Vegetarian: no
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Soups
Date prepared: 1 November 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Loukaniko sausage – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Leeks & celery – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Stock – Kitchen Basics (Sparks, MD)
Chickpeas, bay leaves & butter – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Spinach – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch NW)
Thyme & rosemary – me!
Oregano – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)

Comments:
I think this soup edges out last week’s more typically autumnal fare. Better seasonings, for a start, which I griped about last time around. This soup can also be served at more points of the year, including in the depths of winter. Certainly, you can have a bowl of it and feel like hibernating for awhile afterwards.

I blame the sausage. Crumbled sausage of any sort is a rich addition to a soup or stew. Loukaniko is something special, however, and I’d seen it advertised at Whimore Farm’s stand at the market for weeks. So I finally decided to try this Greek classic.

Now, loukaniko simply means, in Greek, “pork sausage,” without referring to a specific kind. In the Anglophone world, however, it refers to a pork sausage with a few specific seasonings, most notably orange zest. (Whitmore Farm’s version includes the zest, along with red wine, garlic, coriander, fennel seeds, cumin and allspice.) The sausage I bought was unsmoked, but some kinds of loukaniko are smoked. I was also intrigued to learn that loukaniko has a rich history, with production of it dating back to the 300s. (The sausage’s name actually is borrowed from Latin lucanica, referring to a spicy pork sausage from Lucania, a Roman province that is now Basilicata and Salerno.)

It’s worth noting that the sausage in this soup is entirely optional. On the other hand, you don’t have to use loukaniko, if you want to go the carnivorous route. Italian sausage is always an option, as is kielbasa (to give the soup a more northern European feel). A more unusual variety like merguez—a North African beef or lamb sausage with chilies and a famously red color—would add a nice touch.

Certainly, the seasoning boost came from the sausage, though the generous use of herbs helped. When my husband and I were eating this soup, we certainly noticed a special something in its remarkable depth of flavor. We can thank all those seasonings in the sausage, as well as the meatiness of the pork. (I should note that the butter is for added silkiness in the texture.) Once you throw in the chickpeas, you have a dense stew.

It would be even denser if you follow Brother Victor’s advice and garnish this soup with croutons. I thought about doing so, but then thought that the two leftover ciabatta rolls in my fridge would do better on the week’s salad. For one thing, Brother Victor also suggests puréeing  the soup—something I thought impossible once I decided to add meat. Croutons make sense on top of a purée, which is basically liquid, but not on a chunky stew like this. Besides, our soup bowls were full enough already.

This is a soup that I’d be very happy to make again. I may need to: we’ll see how harsh the upcoming winter will be.

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Braised Endives with Watercress & Apple Salad

535g whole endives, trimmed & halved lengthwise
4 tbsp sugar
175ml lemon juice (from 4 lemons)
105g finely shredded gruyère
525g cored & thinly sliced tart apples (2 large)
350g chopped watercress
130g chopped spinach
95g chopped shallots (2 medium)
450g bacon, cooked until crisp & crumbled (12 large slices)
cider vinegar to taste
olive oil to taste
croutons (garnish, optional)

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Combine endives, sugar and lemon juice in a 2qt saucepan; cover with water. Cover and bring to a boil over medium heat; uncover and simmer until endives are very tender when pierced with a fork. (This won’t take long.) Drain endives and place them in a 9” pie plate; sprinkle with gruyère. Bake 5 minutes, until cheese is melted. Meanwhile, toss together apples, watercress, spinach, shallots, bacon, vinegar and oil in a large bowl. Serve endives on individual plates with some of the watercress-apple salad, garnished with croutons, if you like.

Yield: 1.3kg salad (excluding endives)
Cooking time: 80 minutes (excluding cooking bacon)
Vegetarian: no
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 1 November 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Endives – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Sugar & vinegar – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Lemon, gruyère & shallots – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Apples (stayman winesap) – Nob Hill Orchard (George & Susan Behling; Gerrardstown, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Watercress – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Spinach – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch NW)
Bacon – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)

Comments:
Mmm…gratinéed endives…Why have I never thought of this before? Why have I never eaten this before? Rich and tasty, to be sure. Somewhat tart, thanks to the lemon; and subtly sweet, thanks to the sugar, though it’s mostly there to keep the endives from becoming too bitter to eat. Then there’s all that rich butteriness of the gruyere, enveloping the endives and perfectly setting off the lemon. When I was a kid, I used to like melting slices of cheese onto crackers. This may be the more grown-up version of that.

The rest of the salad has a lot going for it too. The spinach was leftover from the soup. (I forgot I had a second bag of it in the fridge. So if you make this week’s soup, double the amount of spinach.) But I still did appreciate its heft. The green that does the driving here, however, is the watercress. And I have to say that the watercress from G. Flores Produce is the best I’ve had in years. Highly aromatic, with the classic peppery, pungent, spicy kick on the palate. (What were those round leaves with the pallid green flavor I got at Whole Foods? That used to be the only watercress I could find.)

When I was looking at the recipe and saw that it required endives and watercress, it occurred to me that bacon would be a natural complement. (Adding meat to ordinarily vegetarian dishes is how I get my husband to eat them. Hence my additions to recipes.) Bacon almost always appears in endive salads, and its strong flavor pairs well with that of watercress. All that was missing was the classic blue cheese, but the gruyere was just fine, thanks—though it also pairs quite wonderfully with bacon. And, while apples and bacon are somewhat odd bedfellows, they worked well enough together. (Pears might be a better addition, but apples are available at the market right now.) Be sure to get tart apples, however: this isn’t a salad that needs to be sweet.

The whole lovely salad is wrapped up in a drizzling of cider vinaigrette. I should note that The Farmer’s Kitchen isn’t particularly precise with its dressing recipes (unlike Brother Victor). The cookbook usually just offers suggested ingredients and lets you—the cook—play with the amounts. Which isn’t a bad way to put together a salad. I do suggest keeping the dressing light here, since you don’t want to drown the delicious watercress and cheesy endives in vinegar. This is a salad with a balance of big flavors, so it should be savored and enjoyed. It’s a great way to enjoy the last warm days of autumn.

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Farfalle with Tuna & Sun-Dried Tomatoes

1/2 lb dried farfalle
1/4 cup olive oil (preferably from the sun-dried tomatoes)
1 halved & thinly sliced small onion
20 oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, julienned
3 minced garlic cloves
1 tsp crushed red pepper
30 chopped kalamata olives
1 tuna fillet, in bite-size pieces
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp dried basil
1 tbsp dried thyme

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil over high heat; add farfalle and cook until just al dente, then drain. Meanwhile, heat oil in a 12” skillet over medium heat; add onion and sauté 3 minutes. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute. Add tomatoes; cook 5-7 minutes, until onions are very tender. Add crushed red pepper and olives, stirring well; increase heat to medium-high. Add tuna and all herbs; cook, stirring frequently, until tuna is cooked to desired doneness. Stir in farfalle and serve. Serves 2.

Sources:
Farfalle – De Cecco (Fara San Martino, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Onion – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Tomatoes – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Garlic – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Crushed red pepper & oregano – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)
Olives & tuna – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Basil – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Thyme – me!

Comments:
Well, I can’t really claim this dish as mine, but it comes pretty damn close. The original recipe sounded appealing—featuring much of what you see above, with the addition of several carrots and lots of parsley. So I decided to make it, and then realized that my husband doesn’t really like carrots or parsley. Ordinarily, I would have just decided to make something else entirely. But that combination of sun-dried tomatoes and tuna called to me. So instead, I just decided to adapt the recipe, and probably severely altering it beyond recognition.

The resulting dish was classically Mediterranean. Sharp-tasting and fragrant, it managed to be rich and satisfying, while also light and fresh on the palate. (But still heavy enough to warrant a red wine. We got an agiorgitiko from Nemea.) It did come with a bit of a kick, thanks to the crushed red pepper, but nothing overwhelming. The pepper actually melded quite well with the tangy olives, sweet-ish tomatoes, and herbs and garlic.

The fun part about this pasta dish is that putting it together was almost pure improvisational sprezzatura. Before getting everything started, I didn’t know how much of anything was going into the skillet (except for the tuna). All I knew was that carrots were not going to make an appearance. So I decided to use up a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, and then guessed my way through everything else. The result was off-the-cuff sophistication, something I would have been quite happy with at a restaurant—but that I made!

Yes, I’m very proud.

One thing you have to be careful about in making this dish is the amount of liquid and the cooking temperature. Okay, two things you have to be careful about, but they are related. This dish doesn’t have a lot of added liquid, nor do the ingredients render much, so you need to be careful about how hot your skillet is, to prevent ingredients from drying out and burning. At the time, I didn’t have wine on hand to toss in the pan to help ameliorate the situation. And while I thought about adding some vermouth or arak, I ultimately decided to press on, keeping a close eye on the gas. The dish turned out just fine. Future iterations of this sauce, however, would probably be helped a bit by a few tablespoons of wine—not much more, though. I actually liked the sauce’s “chunkier,” drier texture, and I wouldn’t want things to get too damp.

But these are quibbles on the margins. I managed to fairly make up a pasta dish. A quite a good one, I might add.

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Cider Cinnamon Ice Cream

2 cups apple cider
3/4 cup sugar
1 cinnamon stick
2 cups milk
2 cups heavy cream
1/4 tsp cinnamon
6 egg yolks

Whisk together cider, sugar and cinnamon stick in a small pot over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and cook 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until reduced to 2/3 cup. Remove from heat and discard cinnamon stick. Stir in milk and cream; add cinnamon and egg yolks, whisk until smooth. Return pot to medium heat; cook 15-20 minutes, stirring often, until mixture thickens and densely coats the back of a spoon. Strain custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a medium bowl; cover and refrigerate until completely chilled. Process in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Transfer to a freezer-safe container; freeze at least 4 hours, until firm. Makes 1-1.5 quart.

Sources:
Cider – Nob Hill Orchard Nob Hill Orchard (George & Susan Behling; Gerrardstown, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Sugar, milk & cream – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Cinnamon stick – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Eggs – Organic Valley (La Farge, WI)

Comments:
Cinnamon ice cream is one of my favorite flavors of ice cream, but I can hardly ever find it at ice cream parlors or in pint form in the freezer section. Now, on the other hand, the single greatest benefit of having my own ice cream maker is that I can figure out how to make my favorite, hard-to-find flavors.

This cider-cinnamon one-two punch is a good step along the way. For one thing, it showed me why cinnamon ice cream may be a bit difficult to come by. How so? Because cinnamon ice cream is a tad touchy to make. It’s a challenge to get the texture right: ground cinnamon is rather coarse-grained, such that the ice cream is a little bit gritty. Not too badly, in my opinion, but my husband objects that it’s rather distracting. So, when the time comes to make my own cinnamon ice cream, I think I’ll follow King Arthur Flour’s lead and use a bit of cinnamon oil, rather than ground cinnamon.

On the other hand, the cider component of this ice cream is fabulous. The cinnamon-infused cider reduction has all sorts of alternative uses besides this ice cream. As its own topping for ice cream, for instance, or any sort of desert that calls for a garnish. On the savory end, I see it working with pork chops. And, of course, it would also work in various cocktails.

One way to dress up this ice cream would be to add some finely diced apples. Once upon a time, on a visit to Madison’s wonderful Chocolate Shoppe (an ice cream store that’s been around since 1962), I had an apple-cinnamon ice cream. Cinnamon ice cream base, apple chunks and a caramel ripple. Heavenly. In this ice cream, if you wanted to go that route, toss in the chopped apple in the last few minutes of churning. And I’d recommend a variety that’s on the sweeter side of sweet-tart, and perhaps a bit soft in texture. As much as I love crisp apples to eat out of hand, I don’t want to make that much effort when I’m eating ice cream.

Speaking of caramel, it probably goes without saying that this ice cream goes well with caramel sauce of some sort. We had a jar of espresso caramel from Little Red Fox (littleredfoxdc.com), and its dark undertones were a lovely complement to the ice cream’s sweetness. And it was rather fun to stir the caramel into the ice cream itself.

The few gripes about texture aside, I still enjoyed this ice cream very much. I think I’m really starting to get the hang of it, though I do need to really figure out the nuances of getting texture right. But still, we’re enjoying homemade ice cream. I can’t really complain too much. And let’s face it: it’s kind of fun to have an ice cream that’s appropriate for the season.

It’s Really Autumn Now

Fresh Greens & Beans Soup

1/2 cup bacon drippings
310g chopped white onion (1 large)
20g minced garlic (7 cloves)
140g chopped celery (3 ribs)
1.9L vegetable stock
780g peeled & diced acorn squash (1 medium)
600g canned & drained navy beans
570g chopped spinach
20g chopped parsley leaves
15ml lemon juice
salt & pepper to taste
grated parmesan (garnish)

Set a large pot over medium heat; add bacon drippings and let melt. Once hot, add onion; sauté 2-3 minutes, stirring continuously. Add garlic; cook 1 minute. Add celery; cook 2 minutes to soften. Add stock, squash and beans; cover pot, increase heat to medium-high, and bring soup to a boil. Cook until squash is tender. Add spinach, parsley and lemon juice; cook up to 5 minutes (spinach should be a deep green), seasoning to taste with salt and pepper. Serve hot, sprinkled with parmesan.

Yield: 4.5L
Cooking time: 140 minutes (squash takes awhile to prepare)
Vegetarian: technically yes (if you use oil, instead of bacon drippings, this is vegan)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 25 October 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Bacon drippings – me!
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Garlic & celery – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Stock – Kitchen Basics (Sparks, MD)
Squash – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Beans – Goya (Secaucus, NJ)
Spinach & parsley – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Parmesan – SarVecchio, Sartori (Plymouth, WI)

Comments:
Well, in terms of what I’m cooking, I suppose I can finally say that I’ve dived into autumn cooking. Squash makes its first appearance in my kitchen, for a start. And that’s a vegetable I have to be careful with. It’s a vegetable I easily get tired of, despite its versatility. Why? Because it very quickly becomes monotonous, particularly when puréed. But a dish like this—when squash is a component, but not a dominant one—is a good way to prepare it.

Speaking of diving, this is a good soup to swim around in. The spinach and squash make a lovely pair. The beans had some major heft. I can easily see people making huge batches of this stuff to put away in the freezer, and then take them out again when you want something hearty during the winter.

Brother Victor suggests serving this soup two ways. First, as I made it here; second, puréed. Those who like classic squash soups may go for the second way. Given my criticism of squash two paragraphs ago, the un-puréed way was considerably more to my taste. I did think of pureeing some of it, and then adding it to the soup. But the soup turned out dense enough without doing that.

Actually, this soup’s density is partly my own doing. I only used two quarts of stock, instead of the three quarts Brother Victor called for. You’d be able to stretch this soup out longer if you did that, but I’m not sure it would be as rich tasting. I left out the extra quart of stock, because I realized there’d be no way to consume that much soup in a week. And because I like dense soups; they’re better than thin soups (obviously).

I do think this soup could use some stronger seasoning. The bacon drippings did a fair amount of heavy lifting in this department (also my doing). More herbs would help, such as sage. The parmesan garnish helps, and I discovered that a shot of sherry vinegar provided a necessary boost. Herby croutons are also a possibility. In any event, however, I do believe I’ve made a very good autumn soup. It tastes like the best of how autumn feels.

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Parsnip & Potato Gratin

1kg potatoes, unpeeled, very thinly sliced
610g peeled & very thinly sliced parsnips
470ml heavy cream
20g chopped garlic (5 cloves)
255g chopped white onion (1 medium)
150g chopped arugula
200g chopped tart apple (1 medium)
60g finely shredded gouda
salt & pepper to taste

Grease a 9×13” baking dish; preheat oven to 340ºF. Combine all ingredients––except cream and half the cheese––in a large bowl, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper. Spread mixture evenly in the baking dish, pressing down vegetables so they lay as flat as possible. (It’ll be tight, but they’ll all fit.) Evenly pour the cream over the potato-parsnip mixture; sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake 40-50 minutes, until vegetables are tender all the way through. Let gratin cool 10 minutes before serving (this allows the cream to stop bubbling, and then to set). Spoon onto individual plates to serve.

Yield: 1 9×13” pan
Cooking time: 130 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 25 October 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Potatoes – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Parnsips & garlic – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Cream – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Gouda – Van Kaas, Gourmet Foods International (Atlanta, GA)
Arugula – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Apple (turley winesap) – Nob Hill Orchard (George & Susan Behling; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)

Comments:
In the continuing autumn theme, this recipe uses a slightly more unusual vegetable: parsnips. The more pungent cousin of carrots. They aren’t something Americans eat a lot of, but they are de rigeur across the Pond. A Christmas table in Britain, for instance, is incomplete without a dish of roast parsnips (which sounds lovely).

Parsnips, of course, are related to carrots, and have been cultivated for about as long. (Archaeologists and historians note that it can be difficult to distinguish between the two in ancient Roman writings about food and agriculture.) They have a sort of goofy history. For instance, the Emperor Tiberius accepted parsnips as a form of tribute from conquered Germanic tribes. Apparently, their value stemmed from the Roman belief in parsnips’ aphrodisiac qualities. (No wonder Tiberius wanted them.) Parsnips were also used as a sweetener before cane and beets were available to make sugar. And nowadays, in Italy, parsnips aren’t typically featured in the peninsula’s cuisine, but are fed to the pigs bred to be made into prosciutto.

It’s not difficult to see why parsnips were used as a source of sugar. They’re sweeter than carrots, though carrots obviously can be made into some lovely desserts. Parsnips also have a richer flavor than carrots. The recipe for this gratin also suggests sunchokes as an alternative to parsnips, but nothing beats the latter’s aroma when they come out of the oven. That peppery pungency makes for a great fragrance.

And that fragrance helps make for a lovely gratin. The pungency of the parsnips with the heft of the potatoes is a great combination. And while the recipe notes that the arugula and apple are optional, I thought they were essential once I tasted this dish. The arugula boosts the parsnips’ pepperiness, while the apple brings out their sweetness, and provides its own tart tang to boot.

The only thing I’d adjust would be the seasonings. A bit more salt would be appreciated, either as actual salt or with something else, like a sharp cheese. Now, I used gouda here, but it may be too buttery and mild for this dish. Cheddar wouldn’t be out of line in this context. Then again, an aged—or even a smoked—gouda might provide you with a little something more. (The aged variety doesn’t melt as well, which is why I followed my instinct of avoiding it, but its flavor is unparalleled.) As with all recipes in The Farmer’s Kitchen, flexibility is built in, allowing you to experiment.

And this is definitely a dish worth experimenting with. I do think it’d be better as a side dish than a main course, though I’m not sure what I’d put it alongside. This gratin has so much going on flavor-wise, that a lot of things might appear to pale next to it. Perhaps something meaty that didn’t require a lot of fancy prep to be flavorful (so no smothering chicken breasts in a sauce). A good steak would probably work, be it from your standard cow, or a more unusual animal like bison, deer or other such gamey animals. (I get the sense that emu and ostrich, as might be sold by Valley View Emus at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, would also work.) You’re going for dark meat, something that stands up to this fragrant gratin, but a flavorful fish like salmon would make for an interesting version.

Or you could just have this gratin for lunch.

–––

Farfalle ai Carciofi, Patate e Prosciutto

2 tbsp olive oil
1 small chopped onion
2oz julienned prosciutto
2 chopped garlic cloves
2 tbsp chopped parsley
2 small potatoes, peeled, halved & sliced 1/4”-thick
8oz drained artichokes, quartered
salt & pepper to taste
1 cup chicken broth
1/2 lb dried farfalle
1/4 cup finely shredded parmesan

Set a large skillet or saucepan over medium heat; add oil. Once oil is warmed, add onions; cover and cook 5 minutes, until limp. Add prosciutto; cook 1 minute to soften. Add garlic; cook 1 minute, until fragrant. Stir in parsley and potatoes; season with salt and pepper. Add broth and cover; simmer 5-10 minutes, until potatoes are tender. Uncover pot and add artichokes; cook 10 minutes, until liquid is reduced by 3/4. (Remaining liquid should be almost syrupy in texture.) Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to boil over high heat; add farfalle and cook until al dente. Drain; transfer farfalle to vegetable mixture. Reduce heat to low, stirring well to coat pasta. Add parmesan; adjust seasonings. Serves 2.

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Onion & potatoes – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Prosciutto – La Quercia (Norwalk, IA)
Garlic – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Parsley – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Chicken broth – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Farfalle – De Cecco (Fara San Martino, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy)
Parmesan – SarVecchio, Sartori (Plymouth, WI)

Comments:
It has been too long since I’ve made something out of Cucina e Famiglia, the cookbook by Joan Tropiano Tucci (otherwise known as Stanley Tucci’s mother) and Gianni Scappin. And this is another dish that exemplifies the so-called “Italian way”: a few ingredients prepared simply that are big on flavor and long on nutrition. (You get an adult dose of starch between both the pasta and the potatoes.)

It’s also a fairly sharp-tasting dish, between the prosciutto and artichokes, though the tanginess gets mellowed out by the potatoes. I should note that the recipe also provides for fresh artichokes, which are par-boiled before being finished in the main skillet. (I should learn how to cook fresh artichokes.) The dish does go a lot faster, however, if you use canned artichokes.

A note on prep: I recommend cutting the potatoes into slices that are about the same thickness and size as the farfalle. That ensures even cooking and even eating (in terms of mouthfeel). You shouldn’t have a more delicate shape pasta alongside major hunks of potato.

While the step is optional, I found that mixing in the parmesan before serving was a helpful touch. It made the sauce a bit more adhesive, something I though helped the potatoes. Potatoes tend just to absorb liquid, not hold sauce like pasta. Something that helped the sauce cling to the potatoes is a good assist in my book. And, of course, the parmesan provided a salty, tangy boost to the other salty, tangy ingredients.

This is a dish that I can see being made for a weeknight supper. It’s none too elaborate, but it’s still quite tasty. It also has the rustic simplicity that marks it as a peasant dish, not to mention coziness. So, while you may not want to dish it out for an elegant dinner party, it’s perfect for a pleasant supper for just the family.

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Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream with Chocolate Sauce

For the Ice Cream:
1 cup peanut butter (not “natural”)
2/3 cup sugar
1 cup whole milk
2 cups heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup chopped miniature peanut butter cups (about 15)

For the Chocolate Sauce:
6oz chopped semisweet chocolate
3/4 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 tbsp light corn syrup
pinch of fine salt
pinch of cinnamon

For the ice cream: in the bowl of an electric mixer, combine peanut butter and sugar on low speed until smooth. (It should have the texture of natural peanut butter.) Add milk; mix on low speed for 1-2 minutes, until sugar is dissolved. Stir in cream and vanilla. Cover and chill 1-2 hours (or overnight), until completely cold. Turn on ice cream maker; pour in peanut butter mixture. Let mix until mostly thickened, 10-12 minutes. Add chopped peanut butter cups; mix for up to 5 minutes more. (Ice cream will have the texture of a very thick soft-serve.) Serve immediately or transfer to an airtight container for at least 2 hours, until desired texture is reached. Makes 1.5 quart.

For the chocolate sauce: put chocolate in a small mixing bowl; set aside. In a small saucepan, combine cream, corn syrup, salt and cinnamon. Set over medium-low heat, cover, and bring to a strong simmer. Immediately pour cream mixture over chocolate; let stand 5 minutes. Whisk well to thoroughly combine. Use immediately, or chill until ready to use. To reheat, set bowl over a pot of warm (or simmering) water. Makes 2 cups.

Sources:
Peanut butter – Jif (Lexington, KY)
Sugar, milk & cream – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)
Peanut butter cups – Reese’s (Hershey, PA)
Chocolate – Ghirardelli (San Francisco, CA)
Corn syrup – Karo (Cordova, TN)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)

Comments:
I told you to watch this space. Because now that I’m learning how to make ice cream, I’m not going to stop. Though at some point I may want to make a cake again. But that’ll come later. Much later.

This recipe has a slightly more “basic” style than my first crack at making ice cream. The Mexican-style chocolate ice cream featured eggs, making it “custard-style,” while this one has no eggs. That made this ice cream considerably easier and less time-consuming to make. No stovetop work required to temper eggs in the long process of thickening up the ice cream base. This means that you don’t need to let the base chill as long. I had this peanut butter ice cream done in a matter of hours, without the need to wait until the next day to finish preparing it.

I decided to make peanut butter ice cream as my second flavor because it’s one of my and my husband’s favorite things––particularly when chocolate is somehow involved. And the peanut butter base works like a charm: it’s so rich, even though no eggs are involved. There are peanut butter ice creams, and there are peanut butter ice creams. This one’s the latter.

My husband did gripe a bit, when we first tried this ice cream, that the base was a bit more watery than the first ice cream, but he said that disappeared after another day in the freezer. And I did find it a bit tricky to ensure that the chopped peanut butter cups were evenly distributed throughout the base. But, looking back, that may have been me just being paranoid.

I’m starting to get a good handle on this ice cream thing. There will be more delicious things to come.

Classic Dishes & New Toys

Red Salad

300g red-leaf lettuce, in bite-size pieces (1 medium head)
140g radicchio, in bite-size pieces (1 small head)
570g cored & shredded red cabbage (1 small head)
255g red onion, quartered & thinly sliced (1 medium)
135g red pepper, in thin strips (1 small)
250g quartered & sliced radishes (20 small-medium)
clementines (number to your taste), peeled & separated into segments
1 cup + 2 tbsp olive oil
3/4 cup red wine vinegar
large pinch of dry mustard

In a large bowl, toss together lettuce, radicchio, cabbage, onion, pepper, radishes and clementines. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, vinegar and dry mustard until thickened. Drizzle dressing over salad, toss lightly and serve immediately.

Yield: 1.65kg salad (excluding clementines), 440ml dressing
Cooking time: 90 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (vegan)
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Salads
Date prepared: 11 October, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Lettuce & red pepper – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Radicchio & clementines – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Cabbage – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Onion – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Radishes – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Vinegar – Pompeian, Inc. (Baltimore, MD)
Dry mustard – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)

Comments:
I would actually describe this salad as considerably more purple than red, but I get the idea. It’s kind of fun to combine a bunch of ingredients that are “officially” described as red (as in, have the word red in their names). And while there’s no ingredient in this salad that doesn’t go with any other ingredient, the problem is that there are just so many ingredients.

I know, I know. It’s a really dumb complaint to have. But there may actually be such a thing as too much salad. Unless you’re feeding an army of vegans. If you’re going to go the whole nine yards with this salad, you’ll need to use the biggest serving bowl you have. By “whole nine yards” I mean “make the full recipe as shown.”

I, for one, could probably have done without the cabbage. I like cabbage—and was excited to see it at the farmers’ market for the first time—but even the smallest of them will take up an infinite volume when shredded. Cabbage never ends. I believe it would make for a more manageable salad if you used only the lettuce and radicchio as the base for all the other red vegetables.

To be fair, I might have contributed to this salad’s endlessness by adding the radishes on my own initiative. But what’s a red salad without radishes? Especially when you haven’t done anything with them since spring. I still blame the cabbage.

Brother Victor says to serve this salad as a palate cleanser after the main course (as salads are often served in France). The presence of the clementines—you can also use tangerines—confirms this salad’s purpose as a refreshment. Because there is very little that’s more refreshing than orange juice, which blends very well with the red wine vinaigrette. In fact, I believe this salad could be significantly improved by supreming the orange segments.

(What is “supreming”? It’s a means of separating the fruit into its segments while removing all of the peel, pith and membranes. The segments hold their shape, but you now have considerably easier access to all of the juice.)

This salad would be considerably better if it weren’t so overwhelming. That said, any dish made with high-quality ingredients—as all of these were—is going to have a fair amount going for it. So I can’t complain too much. I just need to realize when a recipe is going to make an unmanageable amount of food.

–––

Even Star Gumbo

30ml bacon drippings
19g chopped garlic (4 cloves)
150g chopped white onion (1 small)
405g chopped green peppers (2 medium)
750ml puréed tomatoes (from 12 whole plum tomatoes, about 800g)
950ml chicken stock
310g sliced okra (20 medium pods)
2 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp filé powder
30ml salted butter
2 tbsp flour
salt & pepper to taste
340g sliced smoked andouille sausage (4 sausages)
225g peeled & deveined 26-30ct shrimp
chopped parsley (garnish)

Melt bacon drippings in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and sauté 2 minutes; add garlic and sauté 30-60 seconds. Add green peppers; sauté 3-4 minutes, until vegetables are soft. Add tomatoes and stock; simmer 10 minutes. Add okra, thyme, filé, salt and pepper; simmer 2 minutes. Meanwhile, make a quick roux by cooking butter with flour in a small pan over medium heat, whisking constantly. After bubbling for 1 minute, transfer roux to the large pot; whisk it in vigorously, then simmer 5 minutes. (At this point, the mixture may be frozen for later use.) Add andouille and let cook 3 minutes; add shrimp and simmer 2 minutes more, until just pink. Serve in individual bowls, each topped with a large spoonful of cooked rice in the center (if you’d like), garnished with parsley.

Yield: 3.1L
Cooking time: 90 minutes
Vegetarian: no
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 11 October, 2014
Rating: ****

Sources:
Bacon drippings & thyme – me!
Garlic, onion & peppers – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Tomatoes – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Stock – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Okra & shrimp – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Filé – Vann’s Spices (Baltimore, MD)
Butter – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Flour – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Andouille – Wellshire Farms (Swedesboro, NJ)
Parsley – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)

Comments:
Mmm…gumbo…A stew that I’ve eaten a-plenty, but have never made myself. In another first, I made this in my brand-new Le Creuset stockpot. (Three cheers for wedding presents!) As with many of the recipes in The Farmer’s Kitchen, this one is pretty flexible—as is gumbo generally. (As with the Thai red curry, some of the variations of this gumbo isn’t particularly authentic, and I’ll explain why. But it is still very tasty.) While I used andouille sausage and shrimp in this delicious dish, the original recipe also suggests chicken, pork, scallops and crab, if you want meat. (If you’re a vegetarian, it suggests corn, mushrooms, eggplant or tempeh. I also suggest some dense greens—chard, collards, kale, mustard—to make a dish à la gumbo z’herbes.)

Gumbo, quite obviously, has a rich history. As the official dish of Louisiana, everyone has a version, and—almost as importantly—everyone who came before had a version too. Meaning that gumbo wasn’t simply a peasant (or slave) dish, though it certainly originated as one. But even the wealthy chowed down on this. Plus, the word “gumbo” is emblematic of Louisiana’s diverse heritage, since the word has two possible origins. First, the word ki ngombo—okra—from Bantu, a language spoken by many slaves brought from Central Africa. Second, the word kombo—filé—from Choctaw.

Gumbo itself is a mélange of the cuisines of the people who lived in Louisiana since its foundation as a French colony in 1718. You see elements of African cooking in the okra; French food, with bouillabaisse noted as a probable ancestor; Spain and the Canary Islands, which had enthusiastically adopted New World bell peppers and cayenne; the Choctaw people, who invented file powder; and even German food, since there was a small but influential German settlement in New Orleans, whose residents introduced sausage-making. There are other influences, such as Creole and Caribbean; another parent dish is callaloo, a spicy stew made with amaranth (or taro), okra and seafood.

The first written mention of gumbo appears in the 1764 record of the interrogation of a New Orleans slave. The record describes a simple mix of cooked okra and rice. Gumbo only got more elaborate from there, though it always held on to its humble roots. It’s clear that, even as the list of ingredients got longer, that  was the result of cooks simply tossing in the pot whatever they had on hand. And then they’d extend the life of a given batch of gumbo by serving it over rice (or grits, for poorer folk) so that more people could eat it. At the same time, gumbo was treasured by the elite. For instance, in 1803, the last French governor of Louisiana hosted a party at which 24 different gumbos were served. The first published recipe for gumbo appeared in 1824, but it didn’t really start showing up in cookbooks until much later in the 19^th Century—sometimes in multiple recipes per book. Still, gumbo remained very much a Gulf Coast dish until the 1970s and 1980s, when Chef Paul Prudhomme’s celebrity status helped popularize it (as well as other classic Cajun dishes).

Where this recipe slides off the rails a bit is in its choice of meats. Given my choice of andouille and shrimp, I discovered that I created a traditional New Orleans version of gumbo, which is the only kind to combine meat and seafood. Outside of Nola, gumbo will feature one but not the other. And while typical meats include chicken, duck, squirrel, rabbit and alligator, beef and pork are rarely used unless they’re in sausage form. (Tsk, tsk to one of the suggested variations of this recipe.) The vegetables for seasoning are the holy trinity of onions, green pepper and celery. (Though I forgot the celery. It was in the fridge, I swear! This is what I get for cooking first thing in the morning, before adequate caffeine has been consumed.) And, of course, a recipe must also feature a thickener of some sort, be it a roux, cut up okra (the “goop”” of which comes in handy here), or file. Or all three, as in this recipe.

The dish also is cooked for a shorter time than traditional gumbos. Really elaborate gumbos can take all day to make, as meat is browned and set aside, as okra is cooked and set aside, as the roux is whisked interminably, as the vegetables are cooked down to mush, as the seasonings are sprinkled in just so, and as meat and okra are returned to the pot for a final stewing. This gumbo didn’t take that long (and thank God for it). My husband also noted that this much tomato wasn’t traditional either, and the Creoles might agree, though those descended from the French settlers would disagree. Part of that was my fault, since I had a fair amount of tomatoes to use up. (The recipe calls for two cups of puréed tomatoes. I went a good cup or so over.)

But I can’t really criticize this gumbo for lack of authenticity, because everyone has their own version. And this recipe even has some built-in flexibility. Some iteration of this recipe may reappear on this blog eventually. It’s too good to just make once.

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Buttered Prawns with Tomatoes, Olives & Arak

4 plum tomatoes
12 peeled & deveined 16-20ct (or larger) shrimp
3 1/2 tbsp salted butter
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper
1.75oz pitted kalamata olives (12-13)
4 tsp arak
3 sliced garlic cloves
2 tbsp chopped parsley
kosher salt

Make a small, shallow X in the bottom of each tomato; drop them in boiling water for 30-45 seconds, until skins are well-split. Remove, rinse under cold water and drain; core and peel tomatoes, then cut each into 4-6 wedges. Set a 12” skillet over high heat; once very hot, add 1 1/2 tbsp butter and let melt. Add shrimp; sauté quickly for 2 minutes, shaking pan. Add tomatoes, crushed red pepper and olives; cook 2-3 minutes, until shrimp are nearly cooked through. Add arak; cook 1 minute, letting it evaporate. Add remaining butter with garlic, parsley and a large pinch of salt; toss quickly to let butter melt and let everything come together in a runny sauce. Serve immediately with bread. Serves 2.

Sources:
Tomatoes – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Shrimp & olives – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Butter – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Crushed red pepper – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)
Arak – Razzouk Distillery (Beirut, Lebanon)
Garlic – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Parsley – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)

Comments:
This recipe comes from Ottolenghi, and I made to give the last good tomatoes of the year a proper send-off. I’d bought them the week before, when Mr. Grohsgal of Even Star said that the tomatoes were reaching the end of their time. So I held on to these babies, and made quite a tasty one-skillet dish.

And actually, apart from briefly boiling the tomatoes, this dish is—as Chef Ottolenghi puts it—“dead easy” to make. Throw everything in a skillet and call it done. And I must say that I was very happy to have a brand-new 12” Calphalon skillet. (Another three cheers for wedding presents!) While I’ve used 12” skillets before, they’ve always belonged to other people (namely, my mom), and I’ve wanted one for awhile, knowing that it beats a standard 10”. It’s quite remarkable, really, how much difference those two inches make. Where once a pot was necessary, a pan is now perfectly capable of doing what I need it to do. And I must say that a 12” skillet looks considerably more formidable on my small stove.

On to the food. This dish is a perfect example of Chef Ottolenghi’s pan-Mediterranean style. Tomatoes, garlic, olives, crushed red pepper—all of these fit into our classic sense of Western (and Eastern) Mediterranean cuisine. But the Eastern side of the sea gets to make its presence known with a more unusual addition to the dish. Instead of, say, just adding wine for flavor, Chef Ottolenghi throws in some arak. And arak is a lovely drink, in spite of its origin in the Arabic word for sweat. If you can’t find it, raki and ouzo would make good substitutes.

When put together, the whole dish is practically a love letter to Mediterranean cuisines. And a zesty one at that. The sautéed olives and garlic make for a perfect marriage of flavors. The crushed red pepper makes it a heady and spicy menage à trois. I’ll stop with the sexual references now. But still. Oof.

I was able to make a meal for two people (my husband and me) out of this, but Chef Ottolenghi recommends it as an appetizer for four. In either case, serve this with bread to soak up the deliciously juicy sauce. I got a wonderful loaf of brioche from Breadfurst. Such a buttery bread seemed appropriate when served alongside a buttery dish. It also helped cut the spice from the crushed red pepper (which you should feel free to increase, if you like heat).

This is definitely an easy dish to make. I would say “Make this now,” but with tomato season over, you’ll have to wait until next year. This will be back.

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Farfalle with Goat Cheese Pesto

8oz dried farfalle
1/2 cup basil leaves (packed)
6 tbsp cilantro leaves (packed)
1/4 cup grated parmesan (packed)
1/4 cup steamed & drained spinach (packed)
1 tbsp softened unsalted butter
2 crushed garlic cloves
1/2 tsp salt (heaping)
1/4 tsp black pepper
3.5oz chèvre

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add farfalle and cook until al dente, then drain. Meanwhile, combine basil, cilantro, spinach, parmesan, butter, garlic, salt and pepper in a food processor; blend until smooth. Add chevre; pulse until well-mixed with other ingredients. Combine farfalle with pesto in a large bowl, mixing until farfalle is well-coated. Serves 2.

Sources:
Farfalle – De Cecco (Fara San Martino, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy)
Basil – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Cilantro – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Parmesan – SarVecchio, Sartori (Plymouth, WI)
Spinach – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Butter – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Garlic – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Chèvre – Leonora, Facendera (Leon, Spain)

Comments:
This was a pasta dish that elicited a very intrigued “huh” from both me and my husband. I’ve had pesto before (rather obviously), and I’ve had goat cheese spreads and dips before (as well as goat cheese on pasta), but I’ve never had a goat cheese pesto. But I should make this pesto more often because it is unique in the pesto universe. (Not to mention infinitely better than alfredo sauce.)

The herb mix here also separates this pesto from the pack. When you think of pesto, basil obviously leaps to mind. And I’ve had a few arugula pestos in my day (including a particularly delicious one from GittOrganics at the Dane County Farmers’ Market). Spinach and especially cilantro are rather more out there. The cilantro in particular gives this pesto a nice bite. (For the cilantro-shy, the herb’s occasional soapiness is dampened out by the other herbs, as well as by the chèvre’s sharpness.) As much as I love traditional basil pesto, a version featuring a mix of herbs is a welcome alternative.

As with all pestos, it can be a bit difficult to get them to coat the pasta. I know the usual tip is to add a bit of pasta cooking water, but I’m always afraid of diluting the flavor of a sauce by doing that. My tip is that, if a recipe makes adding the water optional, don’t do it. If the recipe demands that you do it, do it. Dilution is a real tragedy when one’s sauce is supposed to have an intense flavor. And pestos should be fairly intense. Certainly this one is. I took a bite of farfalle coated in this stuff, and it occurred to me that I could eat them like popcorn.

Speaking of farfalle, I looked them up in the Encyclopedia of Pasta, just to see what varieties and history this pasta had. It doesn’t really have a documented history. Farfalle, it seems, just came about when home cooks began taking small squares of dough and pinching them in the center to make the classic shape. The shape is classic enough that pasta factories adopted it early on in the industrial era. Factories also make farfalle in multiple sizes, with smaller ones served in broth and the larger ones—such as those typically found in supermarkets—served in sauces.

While the shape may be basically universal to the peninsula, the name of the shape varies wildly. Umbrians refer to the shape as fiocchetti—bows—while in Abruzzo and Puglia, people call it nocchette—knots. (The Calabrese also refer to the shape as a knot in their dialect—nocheredde.) Still, calling the shape farfalle—butterflies—isn’t the first instance of Italians naming their pasta shapes after animals. Chiocciolette and lumachine both refer to pasta shapes that resemble snails (or just their shells). Coralli is a cognate of “coral,” and resembles the weird geometry of a polyp. Two kinds of pasta shapes, fischioni and fischiotti, both (vaguely) resemble an Italian species of wild duck. And, of course, the most famous pasta shape named after an animal is vermicelli—“little worms.”

While, of course, you could stick with the farfalle in this dish, many other shape pastas are open to you. I would stick with shape pastas (or pasta corta). This pesto is thick enough, as well as sufficiently viscous, that I’m not sure long noodles would work. (I think something like spaghetti would just get clumpy.) Of course, you could turn this into a lovely appetizer by spreading the pesto on slices of bread. Or just eat it with a spoon. It’s luscious enough to warrant it.

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Seafood Fra Diavolo

1/4 cup + 2 tbsp olive oil
1oz diced pancetta
12 mussels
8 26-30ct shrimp, peeled & deveined
1 cup diced oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes
2 minced garlic cloves
1 cup chicken stock
5oz sea bass fillet, cut up
5oz lobster tail, steamed or boiled, meat diced
1 1/2 tbsp crushed red pepper
1 cup blanched kale (packed), chopped
9oz fresh linguine, cooked until al dente & drained
2 cups small cauliflower florets, roasted until well-caramelized (most of 1 small-medium head)
1/2 cup diced black olives (10 large)
2 tbsp chopped parsley leaves

Set a large saute pan over medium-high heat; add ¼ cup oil. Add pancetta and let it render its fat in the oil. Add mussels; cook 30 seconds. Add shrimp; cook 1 minute. Add tomatoes and garlic; add stock to thin. Add fish fillets, lobster meat and crushed red pepper; cook 1 minute. Add cauliflower, kale and pasta; simmer 30 seconds. Finish with olives, remaining oil and parsley. Serve immediately. Serves 2-3.

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Pancetta – Colameco’s, Lou’s Naturals (Swedesboro, NJ)
Mussels, shrimp, garlic, bass, lobster, kale cauliflower & olives – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Tomatoes – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Chicken stock – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Crushed red pepper – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)
Linguine – me!
Parsley – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)

Comments:
Well, wow. This is a pasta sauce that has everything in it. Many, many flavors, textures and aromas converge in the skillet and then land on your palate, creating a very intense experience. If you make this, I think your dinner table will be very quiet, because your diners will be enjoying this too much to say a word. (A phenomenon I’ve observed in my Italian family. Eating delicious food is the only way to get us to be quiet.)

This recipe comes from the one and only Chef Tory Miller of L’Étoile, Graze and now Sujeo in Madison. He had it published, with an accompanying video, in the newsletter of the Dane County Farmers’ Market (to which I still subscribe even though I no longer can attend that market). Chef Miller saw it as an opportunity to highlight some more unusual uses of Wisconsin’s autumnal vegetables—here, kale and cauliflower. (You can also get sun-dried tomatoes at the DCFM, as I recall, usually from Canopy Gardens.) This dish is emblematic of Chef Miller’s adventurous—almost over-the-top—style, a style that expresses his enthusiasm for awesome ingredients.

For awesome this dish is. (Awesome enough to make you talk like Yoda.)  It starts out at a pretty high level, to be sure, what with frying pancetta in olive oil. And then it just gets better and better at a very quick clip. Because once you’re stove-ready and everything is mise en place, this sauce cooks fast. That’s the nature of seafood.

But note that I said, “once you’re stove-ready.” It takes awhile to get there. Firs t, you have to roast the cauliflower (or otherwise caramelize in a sauté pan), then steam the lobster, and then blanch the kale. Plus prepare everything else, and not all of these things can be done simultaneously. With all the prep, the dish took me about 90 minutes to put together. Don’t let the short instructions fool you. On the other hand, all that prep is entirely and absolutely worth it.

This is because there are no spare parts in this dish, even if a few appear to get lost in the shuffle. Each component enriches the dish in its own way. While the sun-dried tomatoes do the bulk of the driving in terms of flavor (along with the garlic and crushed red pepper), the kale and cauliflower do their bit by adding some heft. And then, of course, the seafood does its thing. Note that the mussels will get stuffed with the pancetta-tomato-etc. sauce, but that’s no bad thing, because that just makes it so much more fun to scoop everything out.

Chef Miller does offer a few ways to play with this dish. Stepping up the crushed red pepper is an option, for starters. He also suggests replacing the sun-dried tomatoes and stock with some homemade marinara sauce, if you’d like a somewhat stew-like dish with more liquid. For my own part, instead of ordinary black olives (like I used), I’d use oil-cured black olives to add a brinier and salty kick. And when you drain the  sun-dried tomatoes, don’t be so quick to throw away the oil. It can be used to fry the pancetta as the start of the whole dish. (You can also save it for salad dressings.)

A note on lobster. Chef Miller uses the meat from a whole cooked lobster. Given my budget (plus my inexperience with cooking lobster and my desire to not kill something in the cooking process), I went with a single tail. This meant that the lobster wasn’t hugely prominent in the sauce. Feel free to use considerably more lobster; I think it would benefit the dish greatly.

But that’s definitely nitpicking in what is an extraordinary supper. It looks great, it smells great, and it tastes even better than that. Given the decadent ingredients and hedonistic flavors, I say you go all out and drink a bottle of dry bubbly with this. (We had a bottle of a Sicilian white wine called grillo parlante, which tasted and felt much like an Italianate grüner veltliner.) We Italians don’t need much excuse to turn a day into a special occasion. The fact that we can make and eat phenomenal food is enough.

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“Mexican-Style” Chocolate Ice Cream with Hot Fudge

For the Ice Cream:
2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 cup light cream
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
2 pinches of cayenne
pinch of fine salt
2/3 cup sugar
5 egg yolks
6oz chopped bittersweet chocolate (60% cacao)

For the Hot Fudge:
4oz bittersweet chocolate (60% cacao)
4 tbsp cubed unsalted butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup water
1 tsp vanilla

For the ice cream: in a 2qt saucepan set over medium-low heat, whisk together milk, cream, vanilla, cinnamon, cayenne, salt and 1/3 cup sugar. Cover and bring the mixture just to a boil (or to a simmer). Meanwhile, whisk together yolks and remaining 1/3 cup sugar in a small bowl until pale, thick and not gritty (sugar will have dissolved). Place the chocolate in a large bowl; set aside. Once milk mixture has come to a slight boil, whisk 1/3 of it (about two large ladlefuls) into the yolk mixture. Whisk in another 1/3 of the milk mixture; return the combined yolk-milk mixture to the saucepan. With a wooden spoon, stir mixture continuously over low heat until thickened slightly (enough to coat the back of the spoon). (Take care that this mixture does not boil or the yolks will overcook. This process may take about 10 minutes.) Pour mixture through a fine mesh strainer set over the bowl with the chocolate. Whisk to combine and melt the chocolate; let mixture cool to room temperature. Cover and chill at least 2 hours (or overnight), until mixture is completely cold. (Place it in the back of the fridge, where it’s coldest.) Turn on ice cream maker; pour in chocolate mixture. Let mix until thickened, 15-20 minutes; ice cream will have the texture of soft-serve. Serve immediately or transfer to an airtight container and chill at least 2 hours, until desired consistency is reached. Makes 1.5 quart.

For the hot fudge: In a heavy saucepan, combine chocolate, butter, sugar, water and corn syrup; set over medium heat. Stir continuously until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Let cool, then cover and store in the fridge. To reheat, place in a microwave-safe bowl; microwave for about 90 seconds, until spoonable. Makes 2 cups.

Sources:
Milk, cream, butter & sugar– Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Cayenne – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Eggs – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Chocolate – Ghirardelli (San Francisco, CA)
Corn syrup – Karo (Cordova, TN)

Comments:
This requires some explanation. In honor of getting a new job, I decided to reward myself with a new toy. I had a lovely coupon from King Arthur Flour that was set to expire in a few days, and I found the perfect thing to use it for: a bright blue Cuisinart ice cream maker!

Why did I get an ice cream maker? Well, why did I want a pasta machine? To make my own complicated things, that’s why. Also, I have a number of tasty-sounding ice cream recipes in my cookbook and online recipe collections, and I wouldn’t get the chance to make them without a maker. As much as I love Ben & Jerry’s, it’s going to have to step aside for awhile.

Of course, the first weekend I had my new toy, I decided to try it out. I went for a custard-style ice cream—that is, an ice cream featuring egg yolks for added thickness. While I knew I had to keep the recipe simple (this was my first try, after all), I didn’t want it to be so simple as to be boring. So I decided on this flavor, not least because chili-chocolate is becoming something of a favorite flavor combination.

The ice cream base here isn’t too difficult to make. No technique is required that would stump an experienced home baker. On the other hand, it does take awhile for anything set over medium-low heat to come to anything resembling a boil. You do have to be careful with temperature, so that your egg yolks don’t cook, but once again, this is nothing that practiced cooks aren’t able to do. You should, however, err on the side of caution when you let the base cool down. The freezer bowl (at least on this Cuisinart machine) has to be, and remain, as cold as you can get it, so the ice cream base has to be as cold as you can get it too. The instructions say “at least two hours” of chilling, but I let it go until the next day. Good things can’t be rushed.

I think I was afraid that actually using the ice cream maker would be tricky. Cuisinart almost makes it look too easy: the only button on the machine is a toggle switch labeled “on/off.” But I was just psyching myself out. As long as the freezer bowl stays cold, using the ice cream maker isn’t tricky at all. The only other thing to be aware of is the amount of ice cream base. Cuisinart is very strict about ensuring that their recipes don’t go over 1.5 quart, which is all that can fit in the freezer bowl (and my base came a bit close to overflowing). Other than that, push the “on” button and let the churning go for 15 minutes or so.

At that point, you have soft serve, so you can serve the ice cream immediately, if you’d like. Or you can pop the ice cream in freezer-safe Tupperware, stick it in the freezer and let it sit for a few hours, until it’s where you’d like it.

Now for the important part: yes, I made real ice cream, and it was quite tasty. And I’m very proud of myself. I don’t think I got it perfectly, but I did quite well for a first try.

This flavor of ice cream hits all the right sweet-chocolate-spicy notes. Stay gentle with the cayenne, and you get an ever-so-light tingle in the back of your mouth that pushes the ice cream up a few notches. So this certainly scratched my chili-chocolate itch. A dollop of dark chocolate fudge sauce certainly didn’t hurt either. Particularly when the recipe comes from the label on a bar of Ghirardelli chocolate.

Texture-wise, I think I got it 90% right. The ice cream sort of falls apart into small chunks when I scoop it into a bowl, rather than sticking together in an elegant dome as it should. But this doesn’t affect the taste at all, and the mouthfeel of it is pretty much what it should be. Fixing this may be out of my control, but this was my first try, and sometimes it doesn’t take much tweaking to improve something.

But most importantly, I have made ice cream! And no complaining that it’s the wrong season for it. You can get ice cream on New Year’s Day in St. Petersburg. There’s no such thing as the “wrong season” for ice cream. Expect many more, and very tasty, experiments to come. Watch this space.

Belated Summer

Author’s Note: Apologies for the slightly late post! This week I finally get down to the real nitty gritty of summer. Meaning that I finally got to cook extensively with tomatoes! I feel like I’m coming to summer a little bit late, if only because the last month has been sort of lost to (very positive) personal craziness. So all this talk of the coming autumn is definitely unwanted. I’m still enjoying summer because I feel like I missed a month of cooking with the season’s vegetables. So I’m sticking to summer with a vengeance. Sort of like the weather in DC right now. Whew!

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Carrot & Seafood Salad

225g peeled & deveined shrimp (36-40 count)
225g 80-60 count scallops
juice of 1/2 lemon, juiced rind reserved
1 tsp salt
60ml white wine
30ml olive oil
15ml cider vinegar (more to taste)
hot sauce to taste
650g peeled carrots, in 1.5”-long julienne (2 very large)
70g sliced scallions (from 7)
220g trimmed & sliced radishes (12 small)
180g peeled & chopped cucumber (1 small)
40g minced dill (1 large bunch)
20g minced parsley (1 small bunch)

Put shrimp and scallops in a pot with just enough water to cover; add lemon rind, salt and wine. Set over medium-low heat, uncovered; cook until shrimp are just pink and scallops are just white, without letting the water boil or simmer. (This keeps the seafood at their most tender.) Immediately drain in a colander and rinse under cold water to stop the cooking. (You can also mix the seafood with ice and drain them again.) In a small bowl, whisk together oil, lemon juice, vinegar and hot sauce; let stand so flavors combine. In a large bowl, mix together carrots, scallions, radishes and cucumber; toss in seafood. Add dill and parsley; drizzle with the oil mixture and toss well. Serve immediately at room temperature, or cover and chill if not serving within 2 hours. Drizzle with more hot sauce and vinegar, if you like.

Yield: 1.63kg salad (120ml dressing)
Cooking time: 95 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (pescetarian)
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 30 August, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Shrimp & scallops – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Wine – Vinho Verde DOC, Gatão, Sociedades dos Vinhos Borges (Gondomar, Portugal)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Vinegar – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Hot sauce – Texas Pete (Winston-Salem, NC)
Carrots – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Scallions – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Radishes – UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW
Cucumber – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Dill & parsley – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Eggs – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)

Comments:
Gentle on the palate with bright flavors and the crunch of summer vegetables, this salad has a warm but breezy tropical feel. It tingles and refreshes. And it has a bit of heft from the seafood, while remaining light. You could wrap parts of the salad in lettuce leaves or rice paper, and this is something that wouldn’t be out of place at a Thai restaurant. (Though, in that case, you might want to replace the dill with some Thai basil.)

This is a salad that cries out for an Asian-style lager as you leisurely eat it by the forkful on your porch or patio. While the hot sauce makes its presence felt, your tastebuds will never feel overwhelmed. All those fresh veggies will cool you down. In fact, Little Serow, a DC Thai restaurant that’s legendary––notorious, really––for the spiciness of its food, provides diners with a relish tray that resembles this salad. They give you baskets full of radishes, cukes, greens and herbs to help cleanse and refresh your palate after you’ve tucked into a salad of rice fritters with chili oil dressing. (Oof! I speak from personal experience.)

Same effect here, though hardly as much spice to begin with.

If you want to continue with the Asian fusion flair, the original recipe suggests replacing the cider vinegar with rice vinegar. That would make for a lighter and sweeter dressing, which would be quite nice in its own way. I like the bracingly sharp tartness of cider vinegar. It provides a nice contrast to the herby and vegetal flavors, and when punched up with some hot sauce, it makes your eyes sparkle some.

This was a tasty, crisp salad. Perhaps it’s a good way to begin transitioning away from classic summer dishes towards more autumnal foods. But there’s still plenty of time to enjoy the warmth and sunshine. Take this salad along when you do. Don’t forget the lager.

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Panzanella

580g peeled, halved & sliced cucumbers (3 medium)
1.4kg cored & chopped tomatoes (4 very large)
470g fresh mozzarella, cubed
410g bread cubes
15g chopped basil
60ml olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
lemon juice to taste

Toss together the tomatoes and cucumbers. 30 minutes before serving, toss in bread, mozzarella, basil and oil. (This gives the bread some time to soak.) Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Serve immediately.

Yield: 2.89kg salad
Cooking time: 55 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 30 August, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Cucumbers – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Tomatoes – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Mozzarella, bread & lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Basil – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)

Comments:
I have had better panzanella, but this is a lovely place to embark on a journey through the tomato salad universe. (Sounds like a great trip. When do we set out?) But first, you desperately, with every fiber of your being, need great tomatoes. And now is the time for them.

What do I mean by great tomatoes? In this context, tomatoes that are immensely juicy––to best soak the bread––but not watery, such that when you bite into a soaked bread cube, the vegetal sweetness tastes like ringing a gong. Tomatoes that have enough heft to hold up under all that liquid, without feeling dry or chalky in your mouth. Tomatoes, in other words, that you’re happy to not stop eating. Because you’re going to be eating a lot of them.

Once you have great tomatoes, a basic panzanella like this one falls into place. Provided, of course, that you have good bread. Something sturdy. And don’t forget to let it get at least a bit stale. Good fresh bread is too doughy to work in panzanella because it’ll just get mushy––and then you’ll have a cold porridge instead of a salad. Let it dry out, and then the tomato juice will rehydrate it, letting the bread cubes hold their shape. Makes for a much better experience.

I did think the cucumbers were a nice touch here. I’ve had them before in panzanella (in Brother Victor’s version in July 2013), but they have a distinctly more noticeable presence here. Which is good: every ingredient in a salad should be noticeable (and noticed), playing its own part in the pageant. If you like, you can toss the cucumbers with some salt and let them sit, draining them to get rid of some of the liquid. That way you won’t dilute the all-important tomato juice. (It would also help to seed the cucumbers.)

The mozzarella is also a lovely addition. Certainly, I’ve never had cheese before in panzanella; it’s not a typical or traditional inclusion. And while I love the taste of it here, I do think the mozzarella risks making this salad a bit too much like caprese. Both panzanella and caprese are classic tomato salads, and I think they should remain distinct from each other. If bread makes an appearance with caprese, it should be in the form of a sandwich or bruschetta.

My other nit to pick with this salad is that, while juicy tomatoes are a treat, it could have used a shot of something tart and sour. Tomato juice, as anyone who drinks V8 juice or Bloody Marys knows, perks up considerably with a judicious sprinkling of lemon juice. And that helped here. Though I do think red wine vinegar would be better––I’ve used it in previous incarnations of panzanella––as a more sustained undertone of tangy sharpness. Olives or capers would help in that regard too.

But still, I can’t complain at all about a dish of unadulterated bread and tomatoes. That’s what panzanella is, at bottom, and that’s what it shall always be, at least. Especially right now, when tomatoes are as perfect as they’re going to be this year. It’s downhill from here.

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Long-Cooked Tomato & Basil Sauce

2 tbsp olive oil
10 chopped garlic cloves
2 cups diced yellow onion (1 very large)
5 lbs cored & chopped plum tomatoes (from 22)
2 dried bay leaves
2 tbsp dried rosemary
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 cup basil leaves in chiffonade (packed)
13oz fresh linguine, cooked until al dente & drained

Heat oil in a large pot over medium-high heat; add onion and sauté 5 minutes, until softened. Add garlic; sauté 30-60 seconds. Add tomatoes and all their juice, stirring well; add bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper, mixing well. Cook, covered, for 2 hours over low-medium heat, stirring occasionally. Uncover pot; cook 3 hours. Remove and discard bay leaves; transfer sauce to a blender or food processor. Purée to neutralize skins and seeds; return sauce to pot. Cook sauce 30-40 minutes over medium-high heat, until reduced by about a third; adjust seasonings. Add basil, stirring briefly; toss with linguine and serve immediately. Serves 3.

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Garlic – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Tomatoes – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV), Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Bay leaves – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Rosemary & thyme – G. Flores Produce, and dried by me! (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Basil – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW), G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Linguine – me!

Comments:
Well, as this recipe and the previous one show, it’s finally tomato time at my house! This was the first week in which I’ve really gone to town in the tomato department. Up until now, I’ve only really used cherry tomatoes.

That wasn’t really intentional. But a month of personal craziness (the good kind) doesn’t make for much opportunity to cook dishes that might be seasonal highlights, even though it was right as tomatoes were coming up to their peak. So I’m making up for it now.

Speaking of seasonal highlights, this is a recipe in which tomatoes really get to strut their stuff, do what they’re best at and meant to do. From the Dean & DeLuca Cookbook, this is a sauce that one gets to labor over for one of the greatest savors––vegetarian or carnivorous––I’ve ever come across. I was quite pleased to be able to pair my own fresh linguine with a sauce like this. (It’s an intense enough sauce that you definitely need hefty pasta, and lots of it to help cut the eye-popping flavor.)

Sometimes six hours––plus more for chopping all those tomatoes––really make a difference.

Excellent tomatoes help too, though the long-cooking of this recipe can also be used as a way to bring more flavor out of from second-best tomatoes. But that wouldn’t provide quite the payoff that really great tomatoes would give you. Haroun Hallack of Redbud said that the plum tomatoes he had this year were the best he’d grown in recent memory. He described their flavor as really intense and concentrated. (I should have taken a bite of one when it was still raw.) This made them––and the ones from Even Star––perfect for a sauce that was going to concentrate their concentrated flavor even more.

The result of all that chopping and hours of cooking was a sauce that was ultimately mind-boggling in its deliciousness. (Not to mention mind-boggling in how much five pounds of tomatoes reduce in all that time.) Extremely acidic from the tomatoes, who would have thought that this variety of deadly nightshade, stewed with garlic and herbs for hours, would be so perfect? (I’m being a bit facetious here.) It’s a classic case of taking ingredients that are delicious separately and putting them together to make them even more delicious.

This is a sauce that, kind of like pesto, you want to make a few batches of in order to freeze for consumption during the afflicting depths of winter. (I do indeed make pesto simply in order to freeze it.) Unfortunately, this sauce is considerably harder to make than pesto. How long does pesto take? Twenty minutes? It’s very hard to convince yourself to put in that much active labor––and let something cook for six hours––just to put it in the freezer. On the other hand, perhaps if you find yourself with more tomatoes than you know what to do with, a batch of this sauce would be in order.

A quick note on herbs. I used rosemary and thyme that I’d bought fresh awhile ago, but hung out to dry because I didn’t need them for whatever I’d bought them for. So if you go with fresh herbs (highly worthwhile), use three bay leaves, two rosemary sprigs, and three thyme sprigs. It’s also very important to not add the basil until right at the end. It needs to stay a bit bright and retain its aromatic oomph (instead of infusing the rest of the sauce with it).

I think this sauce will definitely become at least an annual treat for dinner at my house. It’s so worth the effort, but I’m not sure I could survive its intensity any more than once a year.

–––

German-Style Apple Dumplings

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup shortening
1/2 cup milk
7 peeled, cored & sliced tart apples
1/2 tsp cinnamon
dash of nutmeg
1 1/4 cup brown sugar (packed)
12 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups water

Preheat oven to 350ºF; grease a 9×13” baking dish. In a large bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, salt and shortening, working mixture together with fingers. Make a well in the center; add milk in 3 additions, stirring with a wooden spoon until well-combined. Knead dough lightly into a ball; roll into a 1/4”-thick rectangle, then cut into 6 pieces. (If the pieces aren’t in a roughly square shape, re-roll each piece into a square or circle.) In a medium bowl, mix together cinnamon, nutmeg and 3/4 cup sugar; add apples, stirring well. Divide mixture evenly among dough squares, piling as much of the apples onto each dough piece as possible. (There will be leftover apples.) Dot each pile of apples with 1 tbsp butter. Gather corners of each dough piece and pinch them together over apples to form dumplings. Place each dumpling as done, into baking dish. In a saucepan, combine remaining brown sugar, butter, sugar and water; set over medium heat. Cook until a syrup forms. Pour syrup over dumplings (there may be some leftover); scatter with some leftover apples. Bake 60 minutes, until golden brown. Serve hot.

Yield: 6 dumplings
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 30 August, 2014
Rating: ****

Sources:
Flour & nutmeg – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Shortening – Crisco (Orrville, OH)
Milk, butter & sugar – Giant (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Apples (gravenstein, redcort & arlet) – Nob Hill Orchard (George & Susan Behling; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Brown sugar (light & dark) – Wholesome Sweeteners (Sugar Land, TX) & Domino Foods (Yonkers, NY)

Comments:
Okay, I admit it. I’m starting to bend––ever, ever, so, so gradually––towards fall. Apples are beginning to look quite tempting. I’m still not buying them to eat out of hand (as for lunch); there are too many plums, peaches and melons to go for them yet. (Apples are basically my only fresh fruit sustenance through the winter. No need to switch soon.)

This dumpling recipe came to mind when my husband and I were going to have friends over for dinner. It seemed like a good way to try out some of the year’s early apples––always jaw-achingly tart. Besides, I’d made this recipe long before, in the pre-blog era of my cooking life. And I’d loved them at the time. Now, as I run out of Brother Victor’s recipes to cook, it seemed like a good point to revisit these delicious apple-stuffed dough bags.

For these are quite, quite tasty things. The dumpling dough would make an excellent pie crust, and it holds up under a dense syrup, not to mention all those apples. (By the way, the edges of the crust that bake in the syrup get thoroughly, and deliciously, caramelized.) I’ve had better apple fillings for pies (here’s to you, Mom!), but this one would make a respectable individual-sized tart, and of course makes for a very lovely dumpling. There’s something very appealing about having your own personal dessert, complete in itself––not just a slice of something bigger. Having your very own, that you share with no one else, makes it taste better, I suppose.

I do have one criticism, however. Why use seven apples? I couldn’t get my squares of dough big enough (and I’m not sure I could fit six dumplings that size into a 9×13” baking dish). I think I rolled the dough out thin enough. I don’t remember if I had leftover apples the first time. Oh well, having spice-marinated apples is no big deal; they’re good on their own. If you’d like, you can stew them down into a chunky applesauce, along with any leftover syrup.

But that is just one criticism. Extra apples or not, these are excellent dumplings to make and eat. À la mode, anyone?

–––

Chocolate Spice Stars

1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp ancho chili powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
2 beaten egg yolks
grated zest of 1 orange
1 tsp instant espresso powder, dissolved in 1 tsp hot water
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp orange liqueur (or 1 tsp orange extract)
decorating sugar

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa, chili powder, cinnamon, cayenne, cloves and salt; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar until thoroughly combined and fluffy; add yolks, beating until creamy. Add orange zest, espresso mixture, vanilla and orange liqueur; mix to incorporate. Add flour mixture and mix briefly just until incorporated. Divide dough into 3 equal portions; flatten each piece into a 1/2”-thick disk. Wrap each piece in plastic wrap; chill at least 2 hours, or up to 2-3 days.

Preheat oven to 375º; line cookie sheets with parchment. On a floured work surface, and with a floured rolling pin, roll each piece to 1/4” thickness. Cut out shapes, up to 2”-wide, with cookie cutters, re-rolling out dough scraps until all dough is used up. As done, arrange cookies on baking sheets; sprinkle each cookie with decorating sugar. Bake 6-8 minutes, watching closely to prevent cookies from over-browning. (It’s difficult to tell, because color isn’t a cue.) Remove from oven; let cool on baking sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire racks. Once completely cool, store cookies in air-tight containers in a cool, dry place. Cookies improve with age and will keep for 2 weeks. (They can also be frozen indefinitely.) Makes 80 1.5” cookies.

Sources:
Flour, cayenne & cloves – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Cocoa – Hershey (Hershey, PA)
Ancho powder – Vann’s Spices (Gwynn Oak, MD)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Butter, sugar & orange – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Eggs – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Espresso – Ferrara Foods (Thorofare, NJ)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)
Orange liqueur – Cointreau (Saint-Barthélemy-d’Anjou, Maine-et-Loire, France)

Comments:
Oof! Though these cookies be but little, yet they are fierce. They may look like completely unthreatening Christmas cookies, but they pack a punch. I recommend having a glass of milk handy if you plan on braving a few of them.

No, seriously. These are the true essence of “spice cookies.” Everything else that claims to be “spice cookies” is just pretending. Move over, gingerbread men, because these death stars are in town.

Okay, they’re not quite that strong. But ancho powder makes a significant difference. So does cayenne. Throw in some deep, dark notes from the rich baritone of espresso and you’ve got yourself some serious cookies. The orange lends them a most intriguing aroma too.

I think the key spice here is the cayenne. Why? Because I’ve made ancho-laced pastries before (namely, brownies), and they weren’t this hot. These cookies are powerful bops on the nose and burns in the mouth. Which is one way to prevent yourself from gorging on them, because they are also really good.

I’m a sucker for great spice blends, in savory as well as sweet things. And this mix is a winner. Chocolate, cinnamon, ancho, cloves, orange, espresso and cayenne? Sign me up. The fragrance alone is enough to get me to come out and play. (The dough smells wonderful even before you roll it out and bake it.) And the cookies, turning out none-too-sweet, are a devil’s dance on the palate.

Now, it would be unfair of me not to note that the original recipe is Chocolate Spice Crescents. Technically, you’re supposed to use a crescent-shaped cookie cutter. But apart from not getting much bigger than 1.5”-wide, I think you can use whatever cutters you want. I used stars because that’s what I have. That they gave the cookies a striking Christmas-y look (and I don’t want to think about the holiday or winter yet) was accidental.

But you know what? Screw it, make these for Christmas. The egg nog will knock out the heat. Christmas can do with a bit more unconventional-ness. These cookies would be a great way to start.

A Crazy Month, but the End of Summer?

Author’s Note: Well, I didn’t intend for a few weeks off to become a whole month. But this summer got considerably crazier than I thought it would be. As I indicated last week, I got married, and then my husband and I went to Tokyo, and then we had a large wedding party with our families and friends in Chicago. What I didn’t expect was to get a new job. Though I’m greatly enjoying myself and my new work is a lot of fun, this past month has been––as you might expect––rather overwhelming.

But the cooking continues. How so? Because food is for celebrations, and we’ve had much to celebrate recently. Not only the events in our lives, but also the immense bounty of late summer. There is an abundance of tomatoes and bell peppers now, along with piles of cucumbers and summer squash. And, while berry season has all but ended, there are plenty of melons, peaches and plums to satisfy any craving. Plus, one excellent benefit of living in more southerly climes is that I can buy fresh figs!

The transition to autumn, however, is becoming more apparent. A few wintery squashes are beginning to sneak in, such as butternut and spaghetti. Apples are taking up more and more space on the seasonal stage. Being unwilling to let go of summer quite yet, I’m resisting the switch to fall vegetables and fruits. While August is a few hours from being over, plenty of September still solidly counts as summer. There will be plenty of opportunities for more wintery foods in their own time.

–––

Pasta & Mushroom Salad

160ml olive oil
120ml red wine vinegar
7g minced garlic (2 cloves)
455g dried medium pasta shells
265g stemmed shiitake mushrooms, halved & sliced 1/4”-thick
235g diced red onion (1 medium)
170g chopped black olives
25g chopped parsley leaves (1 small bunch)
225g thinly sliced pancetta, diced & cooked until crisp
300g crumbled chèvre

Whisk together oil, vinegar and garlic until emulsified; let stand for at least 1 hour to let garlic flavor develop. Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add pasta shells and cook 10 minutes, until al dente. Drain and rinse under cold running water until cool; drain again. Transfer to a large serving bowl; add mushrooms, onion, olives, parsley, pancetta and chèvre, tossing well. Pour dressing over salad, tossing gently; cover and chill at least 1 hour. Serve cold.

Cooking time: 70 minutes
Vegetarian: no (can be made lacto-ovo without the pancetta, and vegan without the chèvre)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 9 August, 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Vinegar – Pompeian, Inc. (Balitmore, MD)
Garlic & parsley – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Shiitakes – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Olives – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Pancetta – Calvert Woodley (4339 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Chèvre – Couturier (Hudson, NY)

Comments:
Now this is a pasta salad to write home about. It actually feels dense enough on the palate (and in the stomach) that you might mistake for a classic pasta supper smothered in a rich sauce. But here it is, served cold or at room temperature, and nary a sauce boat to pass. Blame the pancetta and chèvre. And the mushrooms.

One wonders why pasta salads, certainly of the store-prepared variety, always seem a bit sad. (This is definitely my opinion of frozen prepared meals.) There’s always something that’s rather dull about them, enough to relegate them to side dish status. Not so here. This is an immensely satisfying lunch, and a decent supper to boot.

The problem with most pasta salads may be the dressing. Pasta salads can often be treated like potato salads, and so can find themselves smothered in mayonnaise. While I like mayonnaise as much as the next person, it can be overdone. There’s so much more to starchy salads than just mayonnaise. Vinaigrettes work just as well. This one––Brother Victor’s classic garlic-infused vinaigrette––certainly does.

You certainly do have the flexibility of which pasta to use. The original recipe suggests rotelle (the wheels), but it adds that “other noodles” are fine too. I thought shells would be a nice break from penne, the typical choice for pasta salads.

Now, the pasta salad was good enough with just the mushrooms and olives. My husband, however, likes to see a little protein on the dinner plate. So I gave this some thought. The last pasta salad I made (on July 12) featured prosciutto and smoked mozzarella, so I wanted something different that, of course, would go with mushrooms. I knew that bacon and mushrooms go together well, so I decided to give that combination a slightly Italian flair by using pancetta that had been well-crisped. I did want to avoid the classic mushroom-swiss pairing, and I thought that a soft chèvre would be a lovely addition to this salad. I certainly wasn’t wrong.

This is definitely a salad that is all too easy to devour. Why? Because it’s made up entirely of things that are tasty on their own and when combined with one another. Swathe it in some garlic vinaigrette and you have a lovely meal. Just remember to savor it.

P.S. Apologies for no pictures! This salad is that good.

–––

St. Joaquim Salad

For the Cauliflower:
720g 1.5” cauliflower florets (from 1 large head)
60ml olive oil
6g fennel seeds
1g crushed red pepper
1g ground coriander
3g cracked black pepper
3g minced garlic (1 clove)
40g minced shallot (2 small)

For the Potatoes:
380g potatoes, in 1/2” pieces (5 small)
15ml olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

For the Salad:
3 medium beets
235g green beans, trimmed, halved & cooked until crisp-tender
400g cherry tomatoes, halved (quartered if large)
75g diced shallots (2 medium)
35g minced parsley (1 large bunch)
4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled & halved

For the Aïoli:
4 egg yolks
7g minced garlic (2 cloves)
30ml lemon juice (1 lemon)
10ml Dijon mustard
white pepper to taste
235ml vegetable oil

For the cauliflower: combine all ingredients in a medium bowl, tossing thoroughly, then spread mixture in a single layer on a baking sheet. For the potatoes: toss potatoes with oil, salt and pepper; spread in a single layer on a baking sheet. For the salad: preheat oven to 400º; loosely wrap each beet in foil and set on a baking sheet. Place cauliflower, beets and potatoes in the oven. Roast cauliflower for 15 minutes, until lightly browned and soft; let cool. Roast potatoes for 15-20 minutes, until golden and tender; let cool. Roast beets 30 minutes, until tender; let cool, then peel and chop. In a large bowl, toss together cauliflower, potatoes, beets, beans, tomatoes, shallots and parsley. For the aïoli: combine yolks, garlic, lemon juice, mustard and pepper in a food processor; blend until uniform and creamy. With motor running, drizzle in oil 1 tbsp (or so) at a time; when all the oil is incorporated, mixture should be thickened and light yellow. Serve salad with the aïoli for dipping.

Cooking time: 155 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo; can be made vegan without the eggs and a different dressing)
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Salads
Date prepared: 9 August, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Cauliflower, shallots, lemon & vegetable oil – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Fennel seeds & coriander – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Crushed red pepper – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)
Black pepper (tellicherry) – Williams Sonoma (San Francisco, CA)
Garlic & parsley – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Potatoes – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Beets & beans – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Tomatoes – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Eggs – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Mustard – Maille (Dijon, Burgundy, France)
White pepper – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)

Comments:
Another salad that is infinitely improved by cooking everything in a more complicated way than the recipe calls for. Here, Brother Victor said the cauliflower and beets should simply be boiled, but that’s unacceptable. Roasting is a vastly superior technique. Plus, you can introduce considerably more, and more interesting, seasonings. This is especially true of the cauliflower; the beets don’t really need help, since they’re sufficiently distinctive on their own.

I also added the potatoes, since I had some left over from a simple supper and I wanted to use them up. Those went in their own roasting pan, because there are few things better than roasted potatoes. Plus, they went very nicely with the salad’s other components. (The hard-boiled eggs were also my addition, to use up a full dozen.)

For those of you who aren’t carrying this salad in a lunchbox to work, it is entirely possible to make this a salade composée, not just a salade mixte. That is, you can arrange––“compose”––the ingredients, either on a serving platter or on individual plates. You can even set up a bowl of the aïoli in the middle. And that would look quite attractive.

Speaking of the aïoli, I did have to adjust the recipe. Mainly to use less garlic. While part of my operating philosophy in the kitchen paraphrases Julia Child––garlic never hurts––I know that there are exceptions to my general rule. Aïoli is one of them. Perhaps several things featuring raw garlic should be included. In any event, Brother Victor calls for four garlic cloves for every two egg yolks in the aïoli. But I learned from experience that that ratio gets unbearably odoriferous rather quickly: I made that aïoli long ago, and my husband––then my boyfriend––refused to kiss me for a week, due to the immensely strong garlic aroma. So I scaled it way back, for the sake of my marriage. It was still quite tasty, though you still get something of a garlicky burn on the roof of your mouth. Luckily the cherry tomatoes cool you right off.

When wrapped all together, this is a lovely late summer salad. All the components harmonize, which is what you want in such a mélange as this. It’s almost worth being its own dinner entrée, not just a lunch. Sip some white wine on the porch with this one. Isn’t it grand when indulgence can also be healthy?

–––

Celery Salad

For the Dressing:
2 cups water
1 tsp salt
370g coarsely chopped celery (1 small bunch)
240g chopped onion onion (1 medium)
1 egg
15ml Dijon mustard
10g anchovy fillets (from 2)
15g parsley leaves (1 small bunch)
20g basil leaves (1 small bunch)
9g chopped garlic (1 very large clove)
60ml lemon juice (from 1 lemon)
45ml olive oil

For the Salad:
785g chopped celery (16 ribs)
90g spinach
130g mesclun
95g pea shoots
60g mixed micro greens
25g oregano leaves
30g celery leaves
200g finely shredded pecorino
croutons (garnish)

For the dressing: bring water to a boil in a 2qt saucepan set over medium-high heat. Once boiling, add celery and onion; cook 20-25 minutes, covered or uncovered as needed, until celery is fully soft. Drain well and set aside to cool. Combine egg, mustard, anchovies, parsley, basil, garlic, lemon juice and oil in a food processor; purée until smooth. Add celery and onion, puréeing again until it has the consistency of pesto; season with salt and pepper, if you like, then set aside. For the salad: combine celery, spinach, mesclun, pea shoots, micro greens, oregano and celery leaves in a large salad bowl. Mix pecorino with the dressing, then scoop dollops of the mixture onto the salad. Garnish with croutons and serve.

Yield: 1.4kg salad (1L dressing)
Cooking time: 120 minutes (not including making croutons)
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo/pescetarian)
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 23 August, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Celery, lemon & bread – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Egg – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Mustard – Maille (Dijon, Burgundy, France)
Anchovies – Scalia Fishing (Sciacca, Sicily)
Parsley & oregano – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Basil – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Garlic – UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Spinach, mesclun, pea shoots & micro mix – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Pecorino – BelGioioso (Denmark, WI)

Comments:
Yes, I’m beginning the transition away from Brother Victor’s books to the new Farmer’s Kitchen by Brett Grohsgal and Julia Shanks. This is mostly because I’m running out of things to cook in Brother Victor’s books. After nearly four years of constantly cooking from them, 12 Months of Monastery Soups, 12 Months of Monastery Salads and Sacred Feasts are all strikingly used up. They’re filled with my notes, as well as blotches and splashes of all the things I was making from them. It’s been a lovely run, and there are a few things that I would still like to make, but not enough to warrant the books’ weekly use for much longer. (Don’t worry, you’ll still see Brother Victor’s recipes, on and off, for awhile yet. Hopefully well into the autumn, if not early winter.) Yet this is not a sign that I’m giving up the blog. I’ve got too many other cookbooks and recipe collections to even be thinking about that.

Anyway, on to The Farmer’s Kitchen. This recipe certainly attracted me from my first read-through of the book, not least because celery is an immensely under-appreciated vegetable. The rest of the salad is simple enough, but the dressing is remarkably kooky. So I decided to give it a whirl––literally, in the food processor. (I didn’t, however, get the chance to try out some of Mr. Grohsgal’s suggested additions to the dressing, such as white wine, cayenne and worcestershire.)

Now, kind of like the St. Joaquim Salad, the dressing is supposed to be an aïoli. I, however, was hamstrung in following the directions as strictly as they were written. Why? Because the bowl of my food processor is too big to effectively process a single egg yolk, which is the first instruction. So I decided to throw everything in at once, and ended up with more of a celery pesto (particularly once you mix in the cheese). Funny how that works. It sure was sharp and delicious, though. (And the anchovies don’t overpower the rest of the dressing, so never fear.)

The way to eat this salad, I discovered, was to spoon a few dollops of the dressing––mixed with the pecorino––onto the salad and surround it with croutons. Then you pick up forkfuls of the greens and dunk them in the dressing. The greens help cut the sharpness of the dressing, and the croutons provide a contrast of texture (not to mention seasoning). My only gripe is that the celery in the salad could stand to be in bigger pieces, such as bias-cut sticks.

Other than that small thing, though, this was a fairly impressive way to begin cooking out of a new book.

–––

Chiles Rellenos Picadillo

For the Chicken:
450g chicken breasts, in 1” cubes
90g chopped white onion
3g oregano sprigs
4g thyme sprigs
950ml chicken stock
salt & pepper to taste

For the Chilies:
8 medium poblano chilies
4 medium green peppers
olive oil

For the Picadillo:
cooked chicken (above)
140g shredded fontina
25g chopped green olives (from 6)
13g chopped capers
35g chopped golden raisins
3/4 tsp salt

For the chicken: combine stock, onion, oregano and thyme in a 2qt saucepan over medium heat; after 5 minutes, add chicken. Let chicken cook in the bubbling stock, seasoning with salt and pepper, for 15 minutes, until very tender and fully cooked. Using a slotted spoon, transfer chicken cubes to a plate; discard solids from the stock, reserving it for another use. Once chicken is cool, shred or chop; set aside. For the chilies: preheat oven to 400ºF; toss chilies and peppers in oil and spread in a single layer on 2 rimmed baking sheets. Roast 10-15 minutes, until skin is browning and beginning to blister; let cool. Stem and core chilies and peppers; gently cut off their “shoulders,” and remove seeds, then set aside. For the picadillo: mix together all ingredients in a medium bowl. Divide mixture evenly among chilies and peppers; as done, place them in a baking dish and return to a warm oven to heat through and melt the cheese. Serve immediately.

Yield: 12 stuffed peppers (470g picadillo)
Cooking time: 95 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: The Farmer’s Kitchen
Date prepared: 23 August, 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Chicken – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Onion & capers – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Oregano & thyme – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Stock – Swanson (Camden, NJ)
Poblanos & green peppers – UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Fontina – BelGioioso (Denmark WI)
Olives – Musco Family Olive Co. (Tracy, CA)
Raisins – Sun-Maid (Kingsburg, CA)

Comments:
This was certainly a lovely alternative to the usual Tex-Mex chiles rellenos. Don’t get me wrong: I love gooey cheesy dishes as much as the next Alice in Dairyland, but these stuffed peppers definitely had a more interesting thing going. Sometimes lighter is better.

One great benefit of this dish is that the peppers really get to shine. I’ve found that, in your standard Mexican restaurant chiles rellenos, the poblano is usually a mere vehicle for gobs of melted cheese, etc. It doesn’t really get to come through on its own. Not so here; quite the opposite, really. The poblanos’ gentle, but noticeable, heat really comes through. Your nose will run a bit and your lips will burn, so I’d skip the salsa with your chips and go for guacamole instead.

I was actually surprised at how strong the heat of the poblanos was. In this case, I suppose that’s what roasting does. (Ordinarily, roasting just brings out the natural sugars.) On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t have been. When poblanos are dried, they’re renamed ancho, and I’ve cooked things with ancho powder. It’s strong, and remarkably fragrant, stuff. The poblanos, once roasted, certainly were too. (It shouldn’t be surprising that chilies are renamed when dried. Jalapeños, for instance, become chipotles.)

If you’re a bit worried about the heat (and you shouldn’t be), you can use only green peppers. And if you want more heat, then you can use only poblanos. I went with a mix because by the time I’d picked up eight poblanos, I realized I’d basically cleaned out a farmstand of them. A mix is also nice because the green pepper is rather refreshing after the lip-tingling spice of the poblano.

Then there’s the other component of this dish: the picadillo, a recipe that appears virtually everywhere that was colonized by the Spanish, from Cuba to the Philippines. Now, to begin with, this version is not a particularly authentic one. For one thing, the usual choice of meat in picadillo is beef, either ground and then sautéed, or braised and then shredded. But picadillo has this in common with many other traditional and peasant dishes: it can be made with many things. In fact, this version of picadillo hews most closely to Cuban and Puerto Rican custom, which features olives, capers and raisins (often soaked in rum).

I should point out that the raisins don’t make the picadillo overly sweet at all. It blends nicely with the cheese (a rather rare addition to picadillo) and provides a welcome bit of relief from the chili heat. In fact, Mexican versions of picadillo occasionally feature honey, so raisins may actually be a lighter choice. Also, on the cheese, the recipe suggests monterey jack as an alternative to fontina. I liked the fontina because of its creaminess when it melted; it provided a good binding for all the other picadillo ingredients.

The cookbook also has a few ways you could bring this picadillo up-market. Using dried currants instead of raisins, for instance, or even smoked duck breast instead of chicken. Which is beginning to sound quite fancy. However you end up making this dish, you’ll have quite a nice meal.

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Marinated Lamb with Feta & Mint Sauce Vierge

1 lb boneless butterflied leg of lamb, in 1/2-3/4” strips
5oz chopped white onion
2 crushed garlic cloves
5 tbsp white wine
chopped leaves of 2 thyme sprigs
chopped leaves of 2 oregano sprigs
5 1/2 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
1 cup mint leaves (packed)
1 tsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp superfine sugar
8oz crumbled feta

In a medium bowl, combine onion, garlic, wine, thyme, oregano and 2 1/2 tbsp oil; add lamb, tossing to coat well. Marinate in the fridge for at least 3 hours (and up to 8 hours), turning occasionally. Before making the mint sauce, remove lamb and feta from the fridge. Mince the mint, then mix with vinegar, sugar and remaining oil; set aside. Set a large skillet over medium-high heat; add a bit of oil and swirl to coat the pan. Once oil is shimmering, add the entire lamb mixture to the skillet. Cook 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until liquid has completely evaporated and meat and onions are browning well. (Moderate heat, and cover or uncover, as needed. You may need to lower the  heat significantly in the last 10 minutes or so of cooking.) Season to taste with salt and pepper. (Be cautious with the salt. Don’t forget that the feta is quite salty itself.) Add feta in the last 2 minutes of cooking, stirring to melt it slightly. (It will cling to the lamb.) Transfer contents of the skillet to individual plates and serve immediately with the mint mixture for dipping. Serves 2.

Sources:
Lamb – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Garlic – UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW
Wine – Vinho Verde DOC, Gatão, Sociedades dos Vinhos Borges (Gondomar, Portugal)
Thyme, oregano & mint – G. Flores Produce (Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Vinegar – Pompeian, Inc. (Baltimore, MD)
Superfine sugar – me! (ground from granulated sugar by Domino Foods)
Feta – Boar’s Head Provision Co. (Sarasota, FL)

Comments:
I am very proud to say that this recipe was, for the most part, created by me, as adapted from another recipe. The inspiration for this dish came from a very lovely organization, Naked Wines. It’s a combination co-operative and Kickstarter––but just for winemakers and wine drinkers. The winemakers tend to come with long histories and careers in the wine industry, and now want to stop making mainstream, Robert Parker-baiting wines. They really want to make the best wines they can, and often rather experimental ones as well. (And a few might not have made their own wineries work without Naked Wines’ help.) I should make it clear that the winemakers come from pretty much everywhere: California, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Spain, France and Italy. I’m just waiting for them to add some German and Austrian winemakers, given how much of a dork for grüner veltliner I am.

The wine drinkers bring the money. Members––about 50,000 of them now––put in $20 per month (or more) to help finance the making of these wines. In exchange, they get to buy the wines at wholesale prices, as well as a free bottle on occasion. (This has the added benefit of keeping costs down for winemakers, since they don’t have to put as much money toward marketing, and they can avoid paying distributors exorbitant fees for service.) Members, of course, are able to write reviews of the wines they buy. Uniquely, however, winemakers are able to reply, leading to fascinating discussions about what works and what doesn’t. This gives Naked Wines something of a social network aspect––but without the trolls. (Naked Wines gets a huge number of points on my scorecard for that. Do wine drinkers never get angry at each other?) I’ve been a member since last fall, and it’s been nothing but fun.

Anyway, I recently cashed in on six months of payments (i.e., $120, or a whole case worth), and one of the wines I got was a cabernet sauvignon called Rock It Like a Redhead by Jen Pfeiffer from Victoria, Australia. Ms. Pfeiffer had mentioned, in the forum on this wine, that she loves serving it with grilled lamb and feta.

Now, I don’t have a grill (and I don’t have a patio). But in my head, I did play with the idea for a lamb and feta dish to pair with this wine. Poking around Saveur, I found a grilled lamb recipe from Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s legendary local-seasonal establishment in San Francisco. Her recipe didn’t feature feta, nor did it slice up the lamb. But it did inspire the marinade here, and provided the recipe for the all-important mint sauce. (Don’t get too hung up on the term sauce vierge––“virgin sauce”––since it just means a sauce that doesn’t require stovetop work.)

So I adapted the grilled recipe to work in a skillet. The results of which were utterly delicious––and very rich. Perhaps this should have been obvious, because the lamb is marinated entirely in tasty things that get along like gangbusters. I can’t quite call it a stew, because the liquid totally evaporates, leaving some meltingly tender lamb on your plate. Whatever this dish is, it gives you that happy, cozy, comfort-food feeling. The feta’s melting onto the lamb makes this dish to die for.

While the lamb and feta are quite salty, that flavor is sliced through cleanly and sparklingly by the mint sauce, thanks to its herby sweetness. Which is why I say the mint sauce is all-important; it is absolutely indispensable. The wine, it goes without saying, worked like a charm. It was a great foil for both lamb and mint, since it was quite fruity, full-flavored and satiny smooth going down. (It’s tempting, but don’t drink it too quickly, because it’s worth savoring.)

My husband suggested serving this dish in pitas, possibly with some chopped olives. I’m quite happy with this as it is, though. It’s a dish with enough flexibility to appear on the table at a dinner party, or at a fancy lunch. I will happily make this again and again.

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Peanut Butter Layer Brownies

For the Brownies:
1/3 cup cocoa
1 1/2 tsp instant espresso powder
10 tbsp boiling water
2oz diced unsweetened chocolate
4 tbsp melted unsalted butter
10 tbsp vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
2 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp salt

For the Filling:
3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
8 tbsp unsalted butter
pinch of salt
2 cups powdered sugar
1 1/2 tbsp milk
1 tbsp heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla

For the Icing:
1 1/2 cup milk chocolate chips
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter

For the brownies: preheat oven to 350º; butter a 9×13” baking pan, then line fully (i.e., bottom and sides) with parchment, leaving a small overhang. In a large bowl, whisk together cocoa, espresso and water until smooth; add chocolate, whisking until melted. Whisk in butter and oil; add eggs, egg yolks and vanilla, whisking until smooth. Whisk in sugar until fully incorporated; add flour and salt, mixing until combined. Pour batter into baking pan; bake 30-32 minutes, until a tester inserted in the center comes out with some moist crumbs or batter sticking to it. (Brownie may have big lumps in some places. These will deflate as brownies cool.) Transfer pan to a wire rack; cool 60-90 minutes.

For the filling: in the bowl of an electric mixer, beat together peanut butter, butter and salt on medium speed, until smooth and creamy. Reduce speed to low; add a third of the powdered sugar, mixing to combine. Add milk, mixing to combine; add another third of the powdered sugar, mixing to combine. Add cream, mixing to combine; add remaining powdered sugar, mixing to combine. Add vanilla and mix to incorporate; increase speed to medium-high, beating until completely smooth. Using a rubber scraper, spread filling over cooled brownies.

For the icing: melt chocolate chips and peanut butter together in the microwave for 90 seconds, stirring every 30 seconds, until smooth and melted. (After the last time in the microwave, you’ll have to stir for awhile to make the chocolate smooth. But don’t heat it anymore, or you’ll overheat the chocolate, making it grainy.) Pour mixture over filling, spreading it evenly with a scraper. (This recipe calls for most of a bag of chocolate chips, so scatter the remaining chips over the icing, if you’d like.) Cover and store in the fridge until icing is set. Slice and serve. Makes 24 brownies.

Sources:
Cocoa – Hershey (Hershey, PA)
Espresso – Ferrara
Chocolate – Scharffen Berger (Berkeley, CA)
Butter, vegetable oil, sugar, milk, cream & chocolate chips – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Eggs – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)
Flour – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Peanut butter – Jif (Lexington, KY)
Powdered sugar – Domino (Yonkers, NY)

Comments:
These brownies are quite tasty––for the most part. The best bits are the filling and icing. But…

But the brownie batter doesn’t work completely. It feels too dense in the mouth and has an almost gummy texture, and lacks the classic brownie sweetness. It took me awhile to figure out what went wrong, but an experienced baker will be able to tell, just by looking at the recipe.

The problem is the lack of a leavening agent, such as baking powder or baking soda. This absence as the cause of the problem occurred to me when I was looking over the recipe to write this post. To check that I was right, I compared this recipe to a few other brownie recipes I have and/or have made.

Yep, they all feature baking powder. Hence, note to self: add a 1/4 tsp of baking powder to the batter next time you make these.

Because, despite all the issues with the brownie base itself, this ends up as quite a tasty and sumptuous dessert. So there definitely will be a next time. The chocolate icing and peanut butter filling harmonize seamlessly. I can tell that the brownie base itself (when made correctly) will not be that sweet, thanks to starting with unsweetened cocoa and the added depth and darkness from the espresso. Which makes it a welcome cut to the sweet icing and a filling that is, effectively, a peanut butter buttercream. Not that I’m complaining. Far from it. Just pass me a glass of milk to keep my tongue from gluing my mouth shut.

Regular Redone

Author’s Note: This will likely be my last regular post for a few weeks, since I will be away on a trip to Tokyo for some much needed personal time and R&R with my husband. (Yes, he’s my husband now.) Plus a major wedding party in Chicago not long after we get back. So though my cooking will be on hold for awhile, I look forward to returning to the bounty of late summer and more delicious dishes.

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Fusilli in Spicy Napoleon Sauce

450g dried fusilli
450g shelled peas
125g diced white onion (1 small)
45ml lemon juice (1 lemon)
470ml sour cream
4ml Dijon mustard
1 minced garlic clove
3/4 tsp curry powder
3/4 tsp paprika
3/4 tsp cumin
3/4 tsp coriander
cayenne to taste

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add fusilli and cook 10 minutes, until al dente. Drain and rinse under cold water until cool; transfer to a large salad bowl. Cook peas in boiling salted water for 2-3 minutes until just tender, taking care not to overcook. Drain well; transfer to the salad bowl, then toss in onion. In a medium bowl, whisk together lemon juice, sour cream, mustard, garlic, curry, paprika, cumin, coriander and cayenne until smooth. Pour dressing over salad and toss to coat; chill at least 3 hours. Serve cold.

Yield: 1.5kg salad (530ml dressing)
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Salads
Date prepared: 19 July, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Fusilli – De Cecco (Fara San Martino, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy)
Peas, lemon & sour cream – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Mustard – Maille (Dijon, Burgundy, France)
Garlic – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Curry – Frontier Natural Products Co-op (Norway, IA)
Paprika – Pride of Szeged, SpiceCo (Avenel, NJ)
Cumin, coriander & cayenne – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)

Comments:
A very simple pasta salad, swathed in a complexly spicy sauce. Not too spicy, mind you. Just comfortably lip-tingling, thank you. But it definitely has a lot going on, enough to raise this pasta salad from the level of side dish to a full lunch.

I must admit that I did make the salad a bit late. Peas are a wonderful summer vegetable, but they’re all gone from the farmers’ markets now. Which is a shame. They had a short season this year. Or perhaps DC is just too hot for them; it’s certainly too hot now for salad greens, which are also rather absent. On the other hand, if you’re careful with frozen peas, you can make do. You have to be careful because, while fresh peas cook quickly, frozen peas overcook even more quickly. So a quick shock in the microwave is all that’s needed.

Another thing to note is that the pasta you use is mostly up to you. The original recipe uses rotelle–-wheels––but any shape pasta will do. Fusilli is a lovely choice because it holds sauces quite well, thanks to all of its spaces.

Speaking of the sauce, as I said, this one is quite tasty. I think it can be difficult to get heat and cream to work together, but this combination works like a charm. Cayenne will do that to anything, I suppose. But this sauce has other hot elements as well, such as Dijon mustard and curry, along with strong aromatics like coriander (aka dried cilantro). The tartness of the lemon keeps your tastebuds on their toes too, since it plays on the sourness of the sour cream. Belive me, that cream doesn’t provide much of a relief from the zesty heat. But you don’t want it too.

This sauce is definitely something that can be used in other contexts. Brother Victor suggests using it simply as a dip for crudités, or––more complicatedly––drizzling it over poached salmon. I agree that the sauce would definitely work as a dip, so consider things like fried shrimp, or other tempura-type bites. Mixed with chicken, tuna or hard-boiled eggs, it would make a remarkable alternative to your typical sandwich salad. On the egg front, mixed in with cooked yolks, I think this would be a fun version of deviled eggs, though you’d have to fiddle with the consistency a bit. And these are just ideas to get you started. Because this is definitely a sauce to return to, especially when you need to throw something together quickly.

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Mesclun Salad with Peppers & Mozzarella

455g red peppers, cored, seeded & quartered (3 medium)
500g orange peppers, cored, seeded & quartered (3 medium)
215g chopped red onion (1 medium)
425g fresh mozzarella, chopped
295g mixed greens (e.g. salanova, pea shoots, micro mix)
olive oil to taste
red wine vinegar to taste

Preheat oven to 400º; grease two rimmed baking sheets with oil. Place all peppers in a single layer on baking sheets, turning to coat with the oil. Roast 25 minutes, turning twice, until outsides are well-browned (or blackened). Let cool 10 minutes, then slip off peels; thinly slice lengthwise and transfer to a large salad bowl. Toss in onion, mozzarella and mixed greens. Sprinkle with oil and vinegar, then serve.

Yield: 1.5kg salad
Cooking time: 85 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 19 July, 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Peppers – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Mozzarella – Bel Gioioso (Denmark, WI)
Mixed greens – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV, Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Vinegar – Colavita (Campobasso, Italy)

Comments:
A classic salad, dressed up nicely with roasted bell peppers, one of the great vegetable treats of summer (and fall, but we won’t talk about that season yet). This is a dish that gives you a lot of choices: you can make it as I’ve written it here, or you can add your own flourishes. I did so a few times, adding homemade croutons and chopped fresh herbs. (I used thyme and oregano, but some fresh basil would of course be lovely.) Some chopped prosciutto could work, but the salad works just fine without the addition of that much salt.

Actually, this salad has a refreshing kind of vegetal sweetness, making it perfect for the heat of a DC summer that makes you feel like you’re in a steamer basket. Thank the delicious tongues of bell pepper for that, plus the milky moisture of the mozzarella.

You do have a great choice of greens. Redbud had a tempting array at their stand this past weekend, including salanova (something of a new “it” green), pea shoots and their usual mix of microgreens. On the other hand, the original recipe does call for mesclun, which isn’t strictly any mixed greens you want. How do I know this? Because I just bought the dense and nerdily wonderful Farmer’s Kitchen guide and cookbook, by Brett Grohsgal of Even Star Organic Farm, and Julia Shanks. (Before he began farming, Mr. Grohsgal was a chef.) According to its entry on mesclun, the word comes from the Provençal word mescla (“mixture”). In Provence, the traditional mesclun is equal proportions of chervil, arugula, lettuce of some sort, and endive. In America, it can be a mix of whatever greens you have on hand.

I’ll definitely be using Farmer’s Kitchen more. While its recipes aren’t arranged seasonally, the book’s emphasis is on seasonal cooking, and is meant to be adapted to whatever the climate is around you. And there are many, many recipes that I hope to have grace my table or lunchbox in the coming months, especially as I’m beginning to approach the end of Brother Victor’s books. Also in the Farmer’s Kitchen is a guide to ingredients, including detailed instructions on how to clean, prepare and preserve them, in order to get the most out of them. (This will definitely be helpful.) I can’t wait to make my first recipe out of this book.

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Bison Ragù with Bell Peppers

2 red peppers
2 green peppers
2 yellow peppers
1/4 cup olive oil
7 whole garlic cloves
4 plum tomatoes
2 tbsp canola oil
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 small diced onion
1 lb ground bison
salt & pepper to taste
9oz fresh fettuccine
grated pecorino

Quarter each pepper lengthwise, cutting along the creases; stem, seed and core. Peel each pepper with a swivel-blade peeler; slice lengthwie into strips just under 1”-wide. Pour oil into a pot (or a large nonstick skillet); add garlic cloves and set over medium-high heat. Cook garlic 2-3 minutes, stirring frequently, until well-browned; remove garlic from the pan, reserving three cloves and discarding the rest. Add all peppers to the pot; salt lightly and reduce heat to medium. Cook up to 45 minutes, turning occasionally, until peppers are wilted, very tender and considerably diminished in bulk.

Meanwhile, peel tomatoes with the swivel-blade peeler. (Don’t peel them by scalding them in hot water, or they’ll lose their firmness.) Coarsely chop tomatoes. Pour canola into a 2qt saucepan (or a smaller nonstick skillet); add butter and onion, then set over medium-high heat. Cook onion for 3-4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until pale gold and butter is melted. Add bison, salt and pepper; reduce heat to medium. Cook 5-6 minutes, stirring infrequently, until bison has completely lost its raw color. Add tomatoes (and any accumulated juices); reduce heat slightly, and cook up to 20 minutes. (Tomatoes will mostly melt away, with their liquid absorbed by the bison.)

Transfer bison mixture to the pot with the peppers; mix well. Cook gently for at least 15 minutes, stirring occasionally; adjust seasonings. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add fettuccine and cook 3-4 minutes, until al dente. Immediately drain pasta, shaking off as much water as possible; toss with the bison and peppers. Serve immediately with pecorino.

Sources:
Peppers & canola – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Green peppers & onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Garlic – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Tomatoes – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergman, Lexington Park, MD: Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Butter – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Bison – Nature’s Rancher (Henderson, CO)
Fettuccine – me!
Pecorino – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)

Comments:
This was originally an Italian dish, but it turned itself into a very American one. How so? Well, the original recipe is called ragù di vitello––a veal ragù. Very traditional Italian. But then I couldn’t find ground veal. What to do? I went with the most unusual ground meat I could find––bison. Not Old World at all.

And while the original recipe calls for bell peppers, once I realized I was going to be pairing these natively New World vegetables with bison, the dish began looking remarkably American indeed. Which takes nothing away from its deliciousness.

In fact, I think the bison may have actually improved the dish. Veal is a fairly light meat, with a pale color that resembles the whiteness of pork, but it doesn’t have pork’s heft. Bison, on the other hand, is in-your-face meat. It’s strongly and darkly flavored, giving this ragù an almost smoky undertone. Bison does have a satisfying rib-sticking quality, but it is also remarkably lean, making it a good alternative to beef.

Importantly for this dish, the bison goes very well with the peppers. The meat’s dark and smoky notes make a tasty synthesis with the sweet edge of the cooked peppers. Indeed, the peppers keep this ragù from getting too heavy, and the bison keeps it from being too insubstantial. Toss this into pasta, and you’ve got a lovely midsummer supper. (Though part of me wants this ragù to be a filling in tortillas. It could work.)

While this was a ragù with lovely density, it is, in my opinion, unnecessarily labor-intensive. You have to peel fresh peppers and tomatoes, for God’s sake! What sadistic recipe writer makes you do that?! Now, with a standard vegetable peeler, this is an eminently doable task, but it takes forever, and in all that time you’re wondering what the point of it is. Probably to avoid the peels coming off in small bits in the ragù itself, which some people find jarring, in terms of texture. But I’ve never found tomato and bell pepper peels to be at all unsavory in a soup or sauce, so on the next go-round with this ragù, I’ll just skip those steps. I didn’t see them as affecting the sauce enough to make them worthwhile.

This ragù will probably find its way to my table again, if not this summer, then the next one––with peels intact. Because it tastes of a rich summer, and it’s good to enjoy it while you have it.

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Ragoût de l’Agneau aux Légumes Printaniers

1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1.5 lb lamb, in 1.5”-2” chunks
2 tbsp olive oil
4 cups water
3/4 cup white wine
2 rosemary sprigs
2 thyme sprigs
2 oregano sprigs
1 1/2 cup chopped carrot (1 very large)
2 cups small fingerling potatoes, halved
2 minced garlic cloves
3/4 cup shelled peas
4 chopped scallions

Combine flour, salt and pepper in a small bowl; add lamb, tossing to coat well. Heat oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat; add lamb and brown on all sides. Add wine to deglaze, stirring well to scrape up browned bits; add 1 cup water, rosemary, thyme and oregano, stirring to combine. Bring to a boil; reduce to medium or medium-low. Cover and simmer 1 hour. (Keep pot covered or vented as desired. Add water if mixture is sticking to the pot. Liquid should reduce and then be replenished repeatedly throughout the entire cooking process.) Stir in carrots, potatoes and garlic; cover and simmer 45 minutes. (Again, add water if mixture is sticking to the pot as the liquid reduces. You should use up to 4 cups water by the time the stew is done. Stew should be thick.) Season with salt and pepper as stew cooks. Stir in peas; simmer 5 minutes, until just cooked through. Add scallions, stirring well to combine; cook 5 minutes. Remove and discard herb branches (the leaves should all have fallen off long ago). Ladle stew into individual bowls. Serves 2-3.

Sources:
Flour – King Arthur (Norwich, VT)
Lamb (butterflied boneless leg) – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Italy)
Wine – Pouilly-Fumé AOC, Les Champs aux Moines, Domaine Dominique Pabiot (Nièvre, Pouilly-sur-Loire, France)
Rosemary & peas – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Oregano, thyme, carrots & scallions – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Potatoes – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergman, Lexington Park, MD: Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Garlic – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)

Comments:
I missed the deadline for peas again. Oh well. This stew’s rich and dense tastiness made up for it. I can see this as a dish one might want to make for Easter, as long as the ingredients for it are present. Because new potatoes, fresh peas and scallions make it all worthwhile, raising this dish up a level from ordinary stew to much-anticipated treat.

The stew makes a lovely alternative to classic beef stew. Lamb definitely has its own flavor and texture. This dish in particular also has a number of classically French flourishes to bring it up a few notches––wine and fragrant fresh herbs. These are things to consider adding to your own incarnation of standard beef (or other meat) stew. To this stew, I added the garlic, if only because those few cloves seemed lonely in the crisper. And garlic, in a savory dish, rarely ever hurts.

The long cooking provides the substantial benefit of making the lamb very, very tender. Adding the water for absorption certainly helps too. (You could probably use stock, if you wish. A bit more wine early on wouldn’t hurt either.) That amount of time over heat also infuses the whole dish with the aromatics. But notice the instructions: first you cook the lamb in the wine and herbs, and only later do you add the carrots and potatoes.

This is another bit of French cleverness. You could, to save time, throw everything in a pot at once and cook it in half the time this recipe calls for. But then this stew would lose a good chunk of its distinctiveness. Why? These instructions ensure ultra-tender, falling-apart lamb meat, while preventing the carrots and potatoes from becoming mushy. Everything ends up with the perfect texture, not to mention the perfect taste. Leave it to the French…

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Fettuccine alla Puttanesca

1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper
1 chopped onion
2 minced garlic cloves
1 tbsp anchovy paste (scant)
1 tbsp rinsed & chopped capers
2oz chopped black olives
28oz diced tomatoes
salt & pepper to taste
12oz fresh fettuccine
2 tbsp chopped parsley
grated pecorino

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add fettuccine and cook 2-3 minutes, until al dente, then drain. Meanwhile, heat oil in a pot or large skillet over medium heat. Add crushed red pepper; sauté 30-60 seconds, until quite fragrant. Add onion; sauté 5 minutes, until tender. Add garlic and anchovy paste; sauté 1 minute, until very fragrant. Add tomatoes, capers and olives; increase heat to medium-high and simmer 10 minutes to reduce and concentrate liquid. Stir in parsley, salt and pepper. Toss fettuccine into sauce and serve immediately, garnished with pecorino. Serves 2.

Sources:
Olive oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Crushed red pepper – Spice Islands (Ankeny, IA)
Onion, capers, olives, tomatoes & parsley – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Garlic – Alvarez Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Anchovy paste – Crown Prince Natural (City of Industry, CA)
Fettuccine – me!
Pecorino – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)

Comments:
The standard. The classic. Whore’s sauce. Yep. That’s what the name means.

But technically not quite. Puttana does indeed mean “prostitute,” but puttanesca means “like a prostitute.” You can take this in one of a few ways. First, that this is a sauce “like a prostitute” would make it, which is usually how the dish’s name is interpreted. Or that this is a sauce that one might describe as “like a prostitute.” Spicy and zingy, apparently. Leave it to the Italians…

One wonders how this dish became one of the standard-bearers of Italian cuisine. Maybe it’s because prostitutes, whatever else one might say about them, knew how to cook. As with every other sauce and dish that bears someone’s job title or identity––such as marinara (sailor’s wife), cacciatora (hunter’s wife) and pizzaiola (pizzamaker’s wife)––we don’t know who the prostitute was who invented this sauce.

The legend goes that this was a sauce that was quick enough to make in the time between johns. But could you get the water boiling and the pasta cooked in that time? Quite possibly, no matter whether you were using fresh or dried pasta. This dish is well-timed enough that, after putting the water on to boil, you could prepare the sauce ingredients and then make the sauce in the time it takes to get the pasta done.

This was definitely a tasty morsel of a pasta sauce. Puttanesca isn’t exactly a difficult (or rare) dish, and is certainly made out of things most self-respecting Italians would have in their cupboards. It would be a good dish to make to clean out the pantry, I think. Or to serve as something special in the middle of the week. Because this is a true classic.

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Nutella Chip Cookies

8 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar (packed)
1/2 cup nutella
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350º; line three rimmed baking sheets with parchment. In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream butter for up to 1 minute, until smooth. Add both sugar; beat up to 3 minutes on high speed, until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla; beat on low speed to incorporate. Add nutella; mix until well combined. Gradually add in flour mixture, mixing on low speed until incorporated. Increase speed to medium; mix until dough is just smooth. Stir in chocolate chips by hand. Drop balls of dough by the tablespoon onto the baking sheets; bake 7-8 minutes, until set. Let cool 5 minutes on the baking sheets; transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container in the fridge. Makes 30-35.

Sources:
Butter, brown sugar, flour & chocolate chips – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Sugar – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Nutella – Choco Dream, Natural Nectar (Huntington, NY)
Egg – Eggland’s Best (Jeffersonville, PA)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)

Comments:
Not your average chocolate chip cookie. No indeed. These are definitely up a level or dozen. Because nutella makes everything better, including chocolate chip cookies.

Here, the nutella works rather subtly. The chocolate chips seem to do most of the driving in the chocolate and sweet department. The nutella’s job is to add a significant amount of depth and darkness to the flavor of these cookies, plus a hint of hazelnut. These are richly-flavored cookies, like the standard chocolate chip cookie on steroids.

Their texture is a bit of a challenge to get right. When chilled and straight out of the fridge, I and my husband found these cookies to be a bit dry and sandy. But when they’re very arm––right out of the oven, or nuked for 15-20 seconds each––they’re utterly amazing. Perfect amount of bite, with the chewy give that great cookies have, and––as is always necessary––wonderfully gooey and liquid chocolate chips. Throw in that dark, nutty aroma and flavor and you have a special treat time.

All that was missing was the glass of milk to dunk them in. Or maybe it’s better to skip the milk. These cookies are beautiful when unadorned, so the milk would just be a distraction. You could spoil kids with cookies like these; they’d never want plain old chocolate chip cookies ever again. Indeed, the adults who had these––me and my husband––were pretty spoiled.

Elegance, Summer Hues & a Japanese Feast

Emerald Salad

235ml walnut oil
180ml mixed lemon & lime juice (1 lemon, 5 limes)
2 tbsp sugar
5g minced garlic (1 clove)
pinch of cayenne
65g stemmed & chopped watercress
430g cored & chopped savoy cabbage (1 medium head)
195g julienned carrots (3 medium)
250g chopped yellow onion (1 medium)
25g chopped mint leaves (1 bunch)
100g finely shredded coconut

Combine oil, citrus juices, sugar, garlic and cayenne in a bowl; whisk until emulsified, then let stand 1-2 hours to let garlic flavor develop. In a large bowl, toss together watercress, cabbage, carrots, onion, mint and coconut. Pour dressing over salad and toss lightly to coat. Serve immediately at room temperature.

Yield: 1.1kg salad (420ml dressing)
Cooking time: 80 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (vegan)
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Salads
Date prepared: 12 July, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Oil – Spectrum (Boulder, CO)
Lemon & lime – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Sugar, cabbage – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Cayenne – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Watercress – B&M Gourmet Farms (Fellsmere, FL)
Carrots & onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Mint – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Coconut – ? (but see trytheworld.com for where I got mine)

Comments:
There’s definitely something pacific at work in this salad, though it’s not as tropical as the Mango and Avocado Salads of past weeks. But something puts you on island time with this dish. Blame the coconut.

Certainly the combination of mint and this dressing call to mind a refreshing cocktail. Sans garlic, of course. But even so, the garlic remains subtle in this dressing. And the dressing is quite light, for which I have the walnut oil to thank. But it is very well-seasoned: the deft addition of cayenne really brings out the bright citrus, and makes the sweetness sing. Be prepared to really pucker up with this dressing, a feeling that’s enhanced thanks to the mint. A bite of cool carrot and dense cabbage provides some relief.

Speaking of cabbage, I did have to make a change in this department. The original recipe calls for Napa cabbage (aka Chinese cabbage), but I couldn’t find a head of it that looked good. So I went with the crinkly savoy cabbage. I will definitely use this kind of cabbage again, perhaps as a preferred alternative to green cabbage in salads. Savoy seems more manageable than the ordinary green stuff; it doesn’t feel so endless as you undertake to shred it all.

The watercress, however, gets rather lost in the shuffle. Which is a shame, though I think I bought not-particularly-good cress. Its pungency would have been very helpful here. Good cress is hard to find.

In any event, this was a nice summery salad. Refreshing on the palate when heat and humidity bring you down to the melting point. Its zestiness is truly energizing.

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Pasta & Mozzarella Salad

450g dried rigatoni
420g smoked mozzarella, in 1/4-1/2” cubes
450g quartered & seeded red peppers (2 large)
335g red onion, quartered & very thinly sliced (1 large)
110g chopped arugula
65g chopped prosciutto
180ml olive oil
4 drops hot sauce
60ml balsamic vinegar
30ml lemon juice (1/2 lemon)

Preheat oven to 400º; lightly grease a rimmed baking sheet. Spread red peppers on the baking sheet in a single layer; roast 20 minutes, turning peppers over once, then remove from oven. Let cool, then peel and chop. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add rigatoni and cook 12-14 minutes, until al dente, then drain. Combine rigatoni, mozzarella, red peppers, onion, arugula and prosciutto in a large serving bowl. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, hot sauce, vinegar and lemon juice until emulsified. Pour dressing over salad, toss to coat, then serve at room temperature.

Yield: 2.25kg salad (270ml dressing)
Cooking time: 100 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 12 July, 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Rigatoni – De Cecco (Fara San Martino, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy)
Mozzarella & prosciutto – Calvert Woodley (4339 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Red peppers – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Arugula – B&W Gourmet Farms (Fellsmere, FL)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Hot sauce – Texas Pete (Winston-Salem, NC)
Vinegar – Antica Italia (Modena, Sicily)
Lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)

Comments:
Well, this was a highly satisfying pasta salad. Certainly my fiancé was quite happy with it. It has all of his favorite things, particularly meat and cheese. (The meat was my way of using up the prosciutto from a tasty dinner below.) He did take the opportunity to sprinkle the salad with considerably more hot sauce than the recipe required, but he really does love Texas Pete. I, however, chose to let the sauce remain what it was supposed to be, and that’s as a light flavor boost, a complement to the sweet balsamic.

Apart from this minor disagreement, my fiancé and I both greatly enjoyed this hefty dish. It’s perfect for warm, or hot, summer evenings when you’re hungry but don’t want to eat so much you’ll feel sluggish (thanks to the humidity that makes you melt). It contains a multitude of diverse flavors, some of them so summery it hurts. Case in point: this was the first time in 2014 that I’d roasted red peppers, one of the highlights of a summer.

If there’s one drawback to this salad, it’s that it is so labor-intensive: you have to cook pasta and roast peppers. At least the rest of the prep is straightforward. My one other gripe is due to my own fault. The smoked mozzarella (deliciously stuff!), once cubed, sort of melted back together, making it very difficult to toss into the salad, since it was in huge clumps. Why this was my fault was because I chopped the mozzarella a long time before actually tossing it into the salad, giving it awhile to melt into a fondue in a kitchen well-warmed from the peppers’ being roasted and the pasta’s being cooked. So be sure to chop and toss in the cheese last, keeping it cool before you do.

On the other hand, one thing that I though vastly improved this salad—and it did get 3.5 stars, so my gripes aren’t too big—was putting it in the microwave for a minute before dressing it. It melted the cheese just a bit, helping it cling to the rigatoni, peppers and prosciutto. So you do want the mozzarella to melt, but on your terms.

Rigatoni, according to the Encyclopedia of Pasta, represents a great advance in the quality of pasta. Why? Its name comes from the word rigato, “ridged.” And ridged pastas are better able to collect and hold onto sauces and grated cheeses than smooth pastas. Rigatoni, along with other ridged varieties such as penne rigate, are Italy’s best-selling pastas, particularly in the south. The Encyclopedia notes, with amusement, a bit of trivia: in Roviano, part of Lazio, rigatoni is called scorzasellari, “celery peelers,” since the ridges make the noodle look like a celery stalk.

This is a pasta salad you can make deep into the fall, as long as you have access to good red peppers. In fact, this salad may very well benefit from being made later in the year. Its ingredients have deeper, darker flavors that better call to mind autumn than the bright, popping flavors of summer. Whenever you make it, then, enjoy it.

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Fettuccine Oreganata

9oz fresh fettuccine, cooked until al dente & drained
2 tbsp olive oil
1 diced small onion
4 chopped garlic cloves
2 tbsp chopped oregano
2 tbsp chopped basil
2 tbsp chopped parsley
14.5oz diced tomatoes
8oz tomato sauce
2 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 cup heavy cream
salt & pepper to taste
grated parmesan

Set a pot over medium-high heat; add oil. When oil is hot, add onions and garlic; cook 3-4 minutes, until soft and fragrant. Add oregano, basil and parsley. Add tomatoes, sauce and paste, stirring well to combine; cook 4-5 minutes, until somewhat reduced. Add cream, mixing well; season with salt and pepper. Add fettuccine, tossing to coat. Serve with parmesan. Serves 2.

Sources:
Fettuccine – me!
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Onion, basil, tomatoes, paste & cream – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Garlic & parsley – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Streets NW)
Tomato sauce – Contadina (San Francisco, CA)
Parmesan – SarVecchio, Sartori (Plymouth, WI)

Comments:
This is a lovely, quick-cooking vegetarian sauce, good for everyday pastas. It’s an interesting cut above the ordinary, thanks to all the wonderful herbs, plus a smooth and cozy blanket of cream. I’ve complained before about how it’s hard to get tomato-cream sauces right (they can taste cloying or sweet), but I think this one works.

Actually, this sauce is a good variation on a theme, because it starts as a standard marinara. But then the character of the sauce changes entirely with the addition of the cream. And the recipe also obviates one of my greatest concerns about pasta sauces: that there will be too much liquid relative to the pasta. Though this sauce cooks quickly, it cooks uncovered, so the liquid reduces pretty rapidly, and even the cream boils away. The evaporating cream leaves a thick and highly aromatic sauce in its wake. No complaints there.

Plus, if you must buy dried pasta, you can play a classic trick. Because, if you get the timing right, you can cook the sauce in the amount of time it takes to cook the dried pasta. Which is rather handy. You probably also can get all your ingredients prepared in the amount of time it takes to boil the water. Also handy. If, however, you have fresh pasta, the sauce will hold over low-ish heat for the time it takes to cook the pasta.

This is a recipe that result in less of a special occasion dish and more of an elevated weeknight meal. It makes an ordinary day just that much more elegant and special. Its rich flavors and fragrances bely the simplicity of the dish’s preparation. It’s actually rather remarkable that you can make something this tasty in so short a time.

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Pollo a la Aragonesa con las Pimientas Rojas

olive oil
2.5 lb chicken breasts, in 1-1.5” cubes
1 chopped onion
2 minced garlic cloves
1 shot cognac
2 tbsp chopped prosciutto
1/2 tsp pimentòn
2 chopped tomatoes
3 chopped red peppers
1 chopped green pepper
7oz sliced pimientos, drained
salt & pepper to taste

Heat oil in a large pot. Add onion and chicken; fry until chicken is browned and has rendered a lot of juices. Add garlic; cook 1 minute. Pour in cognac, add prosciutto and stir; add pimentòn. Add tomatoes, peppers and pimientos, mixing well. Partially cover; keep at a hard simmer for 20-25 minutes. Uncover pot and continue simmering 20 minutes more to reduce liquid. (Keep it covered if you want a more soupy dish.) Serve with a large loaf of bread. Serves 3-4.

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Chicken – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Garlic – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Cognac – Courvoisier (Jarnac, Charente, France)
Prosciutto – Calvert Woodley (4339 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Pimentòn – Safinter, Valgosa (Barcelona, Spain)
Tomatoes & green pepper – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Red pepper – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Pimientos – Dromedary, Moody Dunbar Inc. (Johnson City, TN)

Comments:
This is a delicious stew that’s perfect for summer. That it was so delicious was, perhaps, something of an accident. Why? Because I added two red peppers that weren’t called for. And why did I do that? Because I was working too quickly and assumed too much about the recipe. I had bought three red peppers, and then, while preparing the stew, forgot what recipes I needed them for. I needed two for roasting in the pasta and mozzarella salad; the original recipe for this stew requires one. But there I was, merrily chopping away at red peppers without checking the recipe.

But nobody cared. Because did I mention this stew is fantastic? It probably would also be excellent without the extra red peppers, but it’s just so much richer with them. It also has such a happily bright red color, even after a long cooking. If—or should I say “when”?—I make this again, I think I’ll continue to make it with three red peppers.

The rest of the stew is delicious too. I was a bit worried that the pimientos would be a bit lost in the shuffle of gigantic flavors, but they held their own, adding a light zip of sweet brine every now and then. I do think that, next time I make this, I’m going to try harder to find jamon serrano—Spain’s equivalent of prosciutto. It would be more appropriate here, to be sure, though I don’t think the flavor would be affected that much. The way to really boost the flavor would be to add the prosciutto first, with the oil, and let it render its fat alongside the chicken and onion. I’ll make a note for that next time.

Then there’s the chicken. As you might imagine, it’s very tender, but not so much so that it melts at the slightest touch of a fork. Longer cooking might help in that department, if you want more of a braised dish. And, believe me, you can cook this as long as you like. I wanted to get this on the table, as it was approaching 8:30pm, and I was hungry. And, of course, you could also use different cuts of chicken, or a whole chicken. This is a dish that would benefit wonderfully from some bone-in bits and/or dark meat, to give this soup a richer flavor. I used chicken breasts because that’s what Broad Branch Market had. And they made for a delicious stew, to be sure.

It’s weird to think of so many tweaks for an already wonderful dish. Because this is wonderful. But it could be made even more wonderful, if such a thing is possible. Or maybe I shouldn’t pick too many nits. I, my fiancé and our dinner guest cleaned out a giant serving bowl full of this stuff, cleaning our plates with pieces of bread. So clearly we couldn’t get enough of it. But I think this stew will have an even better Act Two.

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Cha Soba

180g dried cha soba noodles
1/2 tsp sesame oil
20g toasted sesame seeds
1 tbsp nori komi furikake (rice seasoning)
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup mirin
1/2 tsp superfine sugar
1 1/2 cup water
4 diced scallions
1” julienned ginger
wasabi paste

Bring a pot of unsalted water to a boil over high heat; add cha soba. Cook 3-4 minutes, until al dente; rinse under cold water and drain well. Transfer to a bowl; toss with oil and sesames. In a small saucepan, combine furikake, soy sauce, mirin, sugar and water; bring to a hard simmer. Keep at a hard simmer for 5 minutes; remove from heat, let cool, and strain out solids. Serve cha soba on individual plates, with a bowl each for the soy mixture, scallions, ginger and wasabi as garnishes. Serves 2.

Sources:
Cha soba – ?
Sesame oil – Hain Pure Foods (Melville, NY)
Sesames – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Furikake – Ajishima Foods (Taipei, Taiwan)
Soy sauce – Kikkoman (Noda, Japan)
Mirin – Eden Foods (Clinton, MI)
Superfine sugar – me!
Scallions – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Ginger – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Wasabi – S&B (Tokyo, Japan)

Comments:
And now for something completely different from Italian and Spanish cuisines, in honor of ten-day trip to Tokyo for me and fiancé. If you actually visit our small apartment, you probably wouldn’t think of us as big fans of Mediterranean culture. This is because of all the Chinese and Japanese art, movies, music, and books in there. (I recently finished reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for instance.) You’d probably think, based on these displays, that we were bigger fans of cooking from their cuisines.

But Japanese and Chinese cuisines are home-cooked rarities in our apartment, Spicy Big Tray Chicken notwithstanding. On the other hand, perhaps a trip to Tokyo will be as culinarily inspiring as my 2009 stay in Paris. (No such inspiration struck when I came home from the Netherlands in 2011, though I did bring back a lovely cookbook. I think this is because the Dutch do an excellent job of keeping their cuisine confined to their homes. All the restaurants you come across are anything but Dutch food. I ate phenomenal Moroccan, West African, Greek and Indonesian meals, and I even had an Italian deli two doors from my apartment.) Plus, I even have a great source for Japanese ingredients, not to mention great sushi: Hinata Sushi in Bethesda. So with the ingredient-finding barrier down…

This dish was inspired by being given a small package of cha soba noodles by my fiancé. What is cha soba, you ask? It’s a kind of noodle, similar in thickness to capellini, made from buckwheat and green tea powder. Why was I given a package of this stuff? Well, my fiancé works for a Japanese newspaper, and whenever anyone travels (back to Japan or elsewhere), they’re expected to bring back small gifts, particularly of food. One of the correspondents had recently come back from Japan with food packages in tow, including the cha soba, which my fiancé decided to try. (This is why I don’t know the brand. All the writing was in Japanese.) I looked up online how to prepare the noodles and we were off to the races. Because between this dish and the next one, we had ourselves quite the Japanese banquet.

Preparing cha soba is fairly straightforward, and eating it is quite refreshing in the summer, since it’s supposed to be served at room temperature or even cold. Prep is simple because it’s fundamentally cooking pasta—in, please note, unsalted water!—and making a sauce. I clearly know how to do that. A few of the ingredients posed a bit of a challenge, though. For instance, I couldn’t find katsuoboshi—dried bonito flakes—at any of my usual haunts, and I didn’t have time to bop up to Bethesda to get them at Hinata. So I substituted the furikake rice seasoning instead. The sauce probably ended up a bit less rich than intended, but it’s simple enough to make again, so it’s no great loss.

Besides, the sauce as it stood was quite tasty. It was light on the palate, but very full-flavored. It also would be easily transferable to dishes besides cha soba, such as fish, chicken or even beef, not to mention other vegetables. Stir-fries would particularly benefit from it.

As for the cha soba themselves, they obviously taste like classic noodles, but with an edge. I suppose it’s been a long time since I’ve had pasta that wasn’t your basic egg noodles, but you definitely notice the green tea. Their mildness was a good setoff to the umami sauce, and the sesames provided a good fragrant and toasty note. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the mild noodles also help put out the fire from true Japanese wasabi—not the watered down stuff made for bland-palated Americans. I think on their own, cha soba would make an excellent lunch, but to make a dinner, look below.

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Nikujaga

1 tsp sesame oil
1/2 lb beef, as thinly sliced as possible in 3-4” lengths
6 small potatoes, peeled, cut a bit larger than bite-size
1 medium yellow onion, in eighths
1 medium carrot, in small wedges
1 cup water
3 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp sake
2 tbsp mirin
6 scallions, in big chunks

In a pot, heat oil over medium-high heat; add beef and cook until mostly browned on all sides. Add potatoes, onion and carrot; cook 1 minute. Add water; cover, leaving no vent. Reduce heat to medium; cook 20 minutes, until potatoes are tender. Add sugar, salt, soy, sake and mirin; tilt pot in all directions to combine ingredients (don’t stir too much). Cook 15 minutes, partially covered; remove from heat and let sit, totally covered, for up to 30 minutes. (This infuses the potatoes with the seasonings.) Add scallions; gently stir a few times, without breaking the potatoes. Serve as is or gently reheat. Serves 2.

Sources:
Sesame oil – Hain Pure Foods (Melville, NY)
Beef (bistro filet) – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Potatoes – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Onion & carrot – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Sugar – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Soy sauce – Kikkoman (Noda, Japan)
Sake – Ty Ku (New York, NY, & Nara, Japan)
Mirin – Eden Foods (Clinton, MI)
Scallions – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)

Comments:
Beef stew may be the closest thing we get to a universal dish—a recipe nearly every cuisine in the world has. (With the notable exception of much Indian cuisine, which excludes beef.) I know beef stew was a staple of dinners in my parents’ house, and our dog was a particular fan of getting a few ladles full on his kibble. But you can find beef stews pretty much anywhere, and they all seem to have the comfort-food heartiness that makes us come back to them again and again.

Japanese cuisine is no different in this regard. When I decided to make the cha soba, I realized that I’d need something else on the table, because we only had six ounces of noodles. I also found that I had some small potatoes, leftover from the previous week’s Pesce alla Palermitana, that needed using up. So to the Internet I went to find a Japanese dish using potatoes. And I found this luscious stew on the highly useful japanesecooking101.com. The blog is run full-time by a former pastry chef and Osaka native named Noriko; it also includes helpful videos with each recipe that give pointers on successful preparation.

Nikujaga is formed from the words niku, meaning “meat”—particularly “beef” in Osaka—and jagaimo, meaning “potatoes.” I love it when a dish’s name perfectly states its essence: here, meat and potatoes. According to Noriko, nikujaga is classic, home-cooked comfort food, like beef stew is supposed to be.

And this is beef stew like it’s supposed to be. True, it might be better in the winter, but it’s delicious at any time of year. The sauce is wonderful and unexpected to European-trained palates. I’m not sure I’d ever think of putting potatoes in a slightly sweet sauce, but wow! It works extraordinarily well here. This dish is rich and satisfying from the first bite, with that sake-mirin sauce blanketing everything quite cozily. I did have to adapt the seasonings a bit, because the recipe calls for ordinary baking potatoes—i.e., something more sizable than what I had on hand. But I think this worked out nicely. I also substituted some extra scallions for the called-for blanched snow peas. (Guess what I forgot to buy?)

An important note on the beef: while this is a beef stew, and can take dense cuts thereof, this dish should be a bit more delicate than the rib-sticking incarnations we’re used to. The beef must be very, very thinly sliced—as in paper-thin. The recipe actually recommends buying the beef at a Japanese market, where it comes pre-sliced, or at least getting a butcher to do it for you. Because paper-thin slices are really difficult to pull off. I got mine to a sort of fondue- or stroganoff-cut, which is good enough. But you don’t want big chunks, otherwise the seasonings, vegetables and meat don’t meld as best as they should, especially given the short-ish cooking time. (That is one advantage of this recipe: it cooks pretty quickly and in a way that lets you ignore it.) Paper-thin beef is a common ingredient in Japanese cooking, since it helps a small amount of meat go a longer way. The ultra-thinness also lets the beef serve more as a flavoring or supporting player, rather than as the star of a dish.

I haven’t too much more to say about this stew except that you should make it. Now. Because it’s absolutely delicious. This is definitely something I will make again and again.

–––

Irish Cream Delights

For the Cookies:
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 tbsp Irish cream
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp salt
1 beaten egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cup flour

For the Frosting:
3 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp Irish cream
3 cups powdered sugar
4 tbsp heavy cream

For the cookies: preheat oven to 350ºF. Combine butter and shortening in a large bowl, beating on medium speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar, Irish cream, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt; beat until combined, scraping often. Add egg and vanilla, mixing well; stir in flour. Shape dough into 1” balls and bake on ungreased cookie sheets for 10-12 minutes, until lightly browned. (Watch carefully: cookie bottoms burn easily, especially on the lower racks of the oven.) Let cool on wire rack. For the frosting: mix together butter and Irish cream; gradually add powdered sugar. Beat in cream until smooth. Frost the cookies and serve. Makes 36.

Sources:
Butter & flour – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Shortening – Crisco (Orrville, OH)
Sugar & cream – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Irish cream – Baileys (Ireland)
Eggs – Eggland’s Best (Jeffersonville, PA)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)
Powdered sugar – Domino Foods (Yonkers, NY)

Comments:
To be sure, these cookies live up to their name. They are a delight. They pack a lot of sweet punch in their two-bite size. (If you’re me, you can stretch those two bites into five. These cookies are rich enough to warrant nibbling.)

Their texture is that of a perfect sugar or snickerdoodle cookie, with just the right amount of crumble to moist chewiness. But if I may gripe a bit, that’s about what they tasted like too. The flavor of Baileys didn’t come through as strongly as I might have hoped. The frosting, on the other hand…

Oh, yes, the frosting. The Baileys comes through loud and clear. So perhaps the cookies just got a little buried underneath the frosting’s strength. Which seems likely, given how much frosting this makes relative to cookies. The ones I made really found themselves slathered with what is, in essence, a Baileys buttercream. (Rejoice!) Do feel free to spread on as much or as little frosting as you’d like. If you have leftover frosting, save it to spread on a layer cake––something my fiancé requested I do with this stuff. You could also try replacing some of the cream with more Baileys, if you want a stronger flavor, as long as the frosting remains just that, rather than a glaze.

It occurred to me that the Baileys may be best considered an enhancement of the cookies’ sweetness, deepening and enriching the flavor, rather than providing its own component. That’s often the purpose of adding, say, wine to pasta sauces. You don’t ultimately taste the booze, but whatever you’re eating has just that much more oomph on your tongue, making the liquor indispensable.

This cookie recipe was also welcome after last week’s labor-intensive extravaganza with black and white cookies. I’d forgotten how easy it can be to make cookies when you don’t have to frost them twice. One area where I could still improve, though, is timing. Cookies easily go from slightly underbaked to blackened-on-the-bottom in about an extra minute or two of baking, in a way that a cake doesn’t. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it; it just requires some vigilant watching in that last minute or two.

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Blueberry-Thyme Soup

For the Soup:
3 cups blueberries
1 cup water
6 tbsp sugar
grated zest of 1/2 lemon
1 1/2 tsp minced thyme
pinch of kosher salt

For the Mascarpone:
4oz mascarpone
1 1/2 tsp honey
1/2 tsp vanilla
juice of 1/4 lemon

For the soup: combine blueberries, water, sugar, lemon zest, thyme and salt in a 2qt saucepan. Cover and bring to a boil over medium heat; uncover and reduce heat to medium-low, keeping mixture at a good simmer for 20 minutes, until somewhat reduced and blueberries have broken down. Let cool to room temperature, then transfer to a blender; puree until mostly smooth. Set a fine sieve over a bowl; transfer puree to the sieve. Stir the puree to help push it through the sieve, then discard solids; chill until ready to serve. Just before serving, make the mascarpone: combine mascarpone, honey, vanilla and lemon in a bowl, stirring to mix. To serve, divide blueberry soup among individual bowls or ramekins; top each with a dollop of the mascarpone. Makes about 3 cups, to serve 3.

Sources:
Blueberries – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Sugar – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Thyme – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Mascarpone – Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery (Websterville, VT)
Honey & blueberries – Nob Hill Orchard (George & Susan Behling; Inwood, WV; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, VT)

Comments:
Of all the things I’ve made this week, including the standout delicious dishes, this one stands out the most. It uses no unusual ingredients, nor any atypical techniques, but it’s one of the most remarkable dishes—and desserts—I’ve made in a long while. It’s also the most original, and likely best, use of summer fruit that I’ve made this year.

Blueberry soup. Who would have thought that this would work? And with thyme? But it’s a luscious concoction that manages to have the lightness of a meringue. While the soup is sweet, of course, the thyme keeps the sweetness from going into overdrive. But that’s secondary to its principal task of deepening and bringing out the distinctive taste of blueberries, overlaid with the herb’s subtle aroma. Blueberry pie filling this is not, as much as I love blueberry pie.

The honey-vanilla mascarpone is a lovely treat in itself. My fiancé thought it rather superfluous, but I think the soup is lovely with or without the mascarpone. It certainly is tasty to lick it up with a spoon, and on top of the right kind of ice cream or sorbet, it would be magical. You can gently stir it in to the blueberry soup, which adds a rich creaminess to the dish. Or you can scoop up half spoonfuls of each at a bite.

One thing that’s notable about this dessert is its restraint. While its flavor is rich, its texture is light. It gives you everything it has, but it doesn’t hit you over the head. There’s an austere elegance and refinement to this soup that quietly demands you take small bites and savor each one, rather than devour the whole thing with relish. Which is just fine, because that way you can enjoy this unusual and beautiful dessert for as long as you like.

Back on Air

Mango Salad Piquant

 

315g peeled & pitted mango, cubed (1 large)
100g Belgian endive, in bite-size pieces (1 medium-large)
80g diced red onion (1 small)
110g diced purple bell pepper (1 medium)
115g diced green pepper (1 medium)
35g minced cilantro leaves (1 bunch)
60ml lemon juice
100ml olive oil
2/3 tsp ground ginger
pinch of cayenne

In a large bowl, toss together mango, endive, onion, peppers and cilantro. In a small bowl, whisk together lemon juice, oil, ginger and cayenne until emulsified. Pour dressing over salad; toss to coat. Chill 1 hour, then serve.

Yield: 755g salad (160ml dressing)
Cooking time: 50 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (vegan)
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Salads
Date prepared: 21 June, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Mango & lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Endive – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Onion & cilantro – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Bell peppers – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Oil – Columela (Cordoba, Spain)
Ginger & cayenne – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)

Comments:
I was a bit nervous about this recipe. Not because I thought it would fail, but because I was worried I wouldn’t find some of the ingredients—namely, the bell peppers. The week before, there hadn’t been any at the farmers’ markets I go to. But then, lo and behold, on the day I was grocery shopping, there were the first green peppers of the year! And some purple ones too. Even the first chilies were making an appearance. So I scooped those babies up for this salad, and promptly bought a few pints of the season’s latest fruits—raspberries, blackberries and peaches. There’s much to be excited about, food-wise, at this time of year.

This salad is a bit goofy. You have the sweet mango next to the bitter endive, an herby kick from the cilantro, and an aromatic-spicy dressing. There’s a lot going on, in terms of flavor. Luckily, these disparate ingredients work fairly well together. Though imperfectly: the endive disappears underneath the juicy mango, and I thought the sweet ginger was subsumed underneath the cayenne. But these are things that could easily be adjusted in later iterations. For instance, I could add another endive.

If I have any reservations about this salad, it’s that it doesn’t really work as a main course. I imagine it would work significantly better as a side dish or relish with some sort of grilled seafood. This salad has a tropicality to it that makes me dream of frozen margaritas on the patio. Grilled fillets or skewers of shrimp or scallops would be a nice entrée, with this salad as an accompaniment. If you’re going the relish route, I’d say to chop everything more finely, so that it better resembles a mango salsa or pico de gallo than a chunky salad. On the other hand, if you’d like to keep this as a main course itself, consider tossing in that grilled seafood. And then do what you can to dine upon this al fresco.

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Risotto with Peas & Turnips

145ml olive oil
375g chopped yellow onions (2 medium)
6g minced garlic (2-3 cloves)
125g diced celery (4 stalks)
460g peeled & diced turnips (5 small)
125g peas (from 1 quart in the shell)
710g arborio rice
dried thyme to taste
salt & pepper to taste
1.9L vegetable stock
grated pecorino to taste

Heat stock in a 2qt saucepan until boiling; reduce heat to medium-low or low to keep it hot. Meanwhile, set a pot over medium heat; add oil. Once oil is shimmering, add onions; sauté 3-4 minutes, until mostly limp. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute, until fragrant. Add celery; sauté 2 minutes. Add turnips; sauté 3 minutes. Add peas and stir well; add rice and toss well to coat with oil, seasoning with thyme. Add 1 cup of stock; stir constantly to keep rice from sticking to the pot until almost all liquid is absorbed. Repeat with remaining stock, stirring constantly and seasoning occasionally with salt, pepper and more thyme. Once all liquid is absorbed, remove pot from heat. Stir in parmesan to taste, if you like, or pass at table. Serve hot.z

Yield: 3.2L
Cooking time: 105 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo; vegan without parmesan)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 21 June, 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Modena, Italy)
Onions – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Garlic – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Celery ­– Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Turnips – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Peas – Even Star Organic Farm (Brett Grohsgal & Christine Bergmark; Lexington Park, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Rice – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Thyme – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Stock – Kitchen Basics (Sparks, MD)
Pecorino – Boar’s Head Provision Co. (Sarasota, FL)

Comments:
A risotto may seem like an odd thing with which to celebrate the coming of summer. For one thing, its labor-intensiveness requires you to be in a hot kitchen on a hot day, constantly stirring a steaming pot of rice for five minutes longer than you thought you could stand. (When described that way, what’s not to love about risotto? *grimace*)

But then again, peas and baby turnips are summer vegetables. Rather underestimated ones, I think. They don’t have much luster next to the glistening rubies, opulent emeralds and rich amethysts that make up the typical summer color palette. (I’m referring to tomatoes, cukes and zukes, and eggplant.)

But peas make for great underdogs. You think you know them well, because they appeared on every weeknight dinner plate you can remember from childhood. And you had to be made to eat them because they didn’t taste that good.

Boy, are fresh peas from the farmers’ market something else entirely. Instead of the wrinkly, limp things you’re used to, you get tender, bright green gems that burst with the sweet vegetal taste that only summer vegetables can pull off. They’re worth buying as whole pods that you shell yourself, though it’s a bit difficult to estimate how many peapods you’ll need to yield, as here, about a cup of the peas themselves. Better to get too many pods than too few. The extra shelling time is worth it.

Turnips make a lovely addition to risottos, thanks to their heft. They hold up well under all the liquid being added and then absorbed. And they stay quite tender; perhaps they’re particularly tender right now. Young turnips also have a nice zestiness that gives this risotto some oomph.

So this made for a very pleasant lunch. I was even complimented on it by some of my colleagues at work. Here I am with my elaborate home-cooked meal, and they have a frozen Lean Cuisine. I think I win.

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Avocado Salad

370g peeled avocado, in large chunks (4 medium)
75ml lemon juice (from 1 1/2 lemons)
200g diced red onion (1 medium)
345g sliced radishes (10 medium)
235g diced green pepper (1 large)
135g diced purple bell pepper (1 medium)
125g chopped kalamata olives
225g crumbled queso fresco
30g minced cilantro leaves (1 large bunch)
sliced pickled jalapeños (garnish)
olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
tortilla chips (for serving)

Place avocados in a large bowl; toss with the lemon juice. Add onion, radishes, bell peppers, olives, queso and cilantro; toss well. Add a bit of oil, salt and pepper; toss gently to coat. Serve immediately with tortilla chips.

Yield: 1.67kg salad
Cooking time: 75 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (lacto-ovo)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 5 July, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Avocado, lemon, olives & queso – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Onion – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Radishes & cilantro – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Bell peppers – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Jalapeños – Hatch Chile Co. (Brunswick, GA)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicliy)
Tortilla chips – Tostitos (Plano, TX)

Comments:
In the continuing tropical theme, while you’re serving your mixed seafood grill with the mango salad, guests can scoop up heaps of this baby on tortilla chips. This is beginning to sound like quite the summer pool party.

Now, it’s true that this dish is indeed a salad, and not really a dip. But you can still get forkfuls of it on Tostitos, and that makes it far more fun—and, I believe, tastier. And if you want to go more towards the dip end of the continuum, feel free to chop everything a bit more finely. And don’t forget the jalapeños—my addition—for a bit of a kick.

This dish is definitely not your usual avocado or guacamole-style salad. And I think that makes it better. For instance, I don’t think I would have thought of pairing avocados and radishes, but the combination works unusually well. That light, peppery bite gives the avocado’s creaminess a bit of flavorful heft. Most other things in this salad are a bit more reminiscent of Mexican food, though I did swap out the called-for black olives in exchange for kalamatas (for whimsy’s sake). The queso was also my addition, since it seemed appropriate.

There’s not much more to say about this dish except that it is everything you want it to be. Simple, direct, tart, salty, vegetal and a bit spicy. Pass the chips and sip that margarita with relish.

–––

Eggplant with Garlic

24g garlic, in 80-100 thin slivers (6 large cloves)
120ml olive oil
2g kosher salt
1g black pepper
3g dried thyme
6g dried rosemary
1g crumbled bay leaf (2 small)
2g dried oregano
1.3kg trimmed Japanese eggplants, halved lengthwise (8 medium)
16g minced garlic (4 cloves)
grated parmesan (garnish)

Place slivered garlic and oil in a small bowl; submerge garlic and let stand 30 minutes. Remove slivers to a small plate; mix oil with salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf and oregano, then set aside. Preheat oven to 350ºF; grease 2 9×13” baking dishes or pans. Make 5-6 slits in the cut surface of each eggplant half; insert a garlic sliver into each slit. Transfer each eggplant half to the baking dishes as done; brush cut surfaces of eggplant halves with the herb-oil mixture, then top with the minced garlic. Cover dishes tightly with foil; bake 25 minutes. Remove foil; bake 5 minutes more. Remove dishes from oven and transfer eggplant halves to individual plates. Garnish with grated parmesan and serve. Serves 8.

Cooking time: 105 minutes
Vegetarian: yes (vegan, without parmesan garnish)
Source: Sacred Feasts
Date prepared: 5 July, 2014
Rating: ***1/2

Sources:
Garlic & eggplants – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Pepper – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Thyme, rosemary, bay leaf & oregano – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Parmesan – SarVecchio, Sartori (Plymouth, WI)

Comments:
Look no further if you want a recipe that makes your kitchen smell magical. This is an extremely fragrant dish. Garlic and herbs—who’d a thunk?

And this did require about a bulb of garlic. I feel like I could have used more, since I ran out of slivers to stuff into the eggplants and had to break into the minced collection. Another few cloves would have done the trick. But despite having to stretch out the garlic, this dish was immensely tasty.

It was also my first use of eggplant this year. G. Flores Produce at the UDC Farmers’ Market has an eye-popping variety of eggplants in all shapes, sizes and colors. I was able to buy eight eggplants that covered all three spectra. (Though I should add that, once baked, the eggplant’s color doesn’t matter so much.) I’ve missed this purple vegetable, perhaps more than I realized, given that I tucked into this dish with relish for lunch.

It certainly makes for a great vegetarian meal, if somewhat labor-intensive. (Then again, what all-vegetable dish isn’t?) Eggplant has a great amount of textural heft, and a deep, dark flavor. So that herby and garlicky oil is a perfect setoff. And the garlic slivers stuffed inside really enhance and enrich the eggplant, preventing it from becoming bitter. (Which is a slight risk with it.) And the sprinkling of parmesan also helps. I’d suggest actually melting the parmesan onto the eggplant, if only so that it’s less of a garnish and more integrated into the whole dish.

Brother Victor writes that this recipe was a favorite of his when he was growing up in the French Pyrenees. It was served with a green salad on the side. (I’ve been serving this with charcuterie and olives. As you will.) I can see why this dish would become a comfort food favorite. It hits all the right notes on that front. While my fiancé is hardly as wild about eggplant as I am, I can see myself returning to this dish over and over.

–––

Pesce alla Palermitana

6 tbsp olive oil
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
1 garlic clove, sliced crosswise
kosher salt & pepper to taste
1/2 lb fingerling potatoes, quartered lengthwise (halved, if small)
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup chopped green olives
1/4 cup rinsed capers
3 oregano sprigs
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 lb skinless cod fillets, in 1” chunks
1/2 cup chopped oregano
1/3 cup chopped parsley

Heat 3 tbsp oil in a large skillet or pot over medium-high heat. Add tomatoes and garlic, seasoning with salt and pepper; cook, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes, until tomatoes have broken down well. Add potatoes, wine, olives, capers, oregano sprigs, juice and 6 tbsp water; bring to a boil. Season cod with salt and pepper; add to pot, stirring well. Cook 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, keeping pot mostly uncovered to thicken sauce. Add remaining oil, chopped oregano, parsley, salt and pepper; cook 5 minutes. Serve immediately.

Sources:
Oil – Antica Italia (Partanna, Sicily)
Cherry tomatoes – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Garlic, oregano & parsley – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Potatoes – UDC Farmers’ Market (Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Wine – Pinot Grigio, Tomaiolo (Tuscany, Italy)
Olives – Barral (Nice, France)
Capers – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Cod – Whole Foods (4530 40^th Street NW)

Comments:
As the name implies, this recipe is from Sicily—specifically Palermo. As much as I, being descended from mainland Italians, make fun of the Sicilians, they get their fish right. That this dish was an unusual one was, so to speak, the icing on the cake. (I don’t ordinarily associate Italy with potatoes, but here they are.)

Now, I had to adapt this recipe a bunch on the fly. For instance, the original recipe calls for red snapper, which was unavailable at my fish counter, so I bought cod as a substitute. I also had some equipment issues, because the original recipe has you bake the fish—left as whole fillets—in the skillet at 450º, but, while I have an ovenproof skillet, I certainly don’t have a large enough one to hold all the fish and the sauce. So I transformed this into a stovetop stew. (I suppose I could have moved everything into a 9×13” baking dish to bake, and then put the fish on a serving plate while returning the sauce to the pot to reduce it a bit. But why use more dishes when you don’t have to?)

This dish, I believe, is as tasty in stew form as it would be in baked form—though the presentation would probably be better with the latter. If I had one small gripe, it’s that it would have been better to chop the potatoes, as opposed to quartering them. This would have avoided ending up with big pieces of potato next to small bits of fish (the cod crumbles easily), which unbalanced the dish somewhat. Not too badly, though.

Because this is still very flavorful, with a lot of elements contributing to a very savory, fragrant mix. Actually, given the lemon juice, capers and olives, I initially thought this stew would have a brinier taste. But while their tartness provided a good overtone, it didn’t dominate. It probably couldn’t have: the potatoes give this dish enough heft, and the oregano enough aroma, to play the main theme. And do be generous with the oregano; it’s so worth it.

Thanks to the cherry tomatoes and new potatoes, as well as the fresh herbs, this is definitely a dish that embraces the early- to mid-summer vegetables currently on hand. Throw in a few Italian pantry staples, and you’ve got yourself the base of a lovely meal. And the fish makes it immensely satisfying.

–––

Black & White Cookies

1 3/4 cup sugar
1 cup unsalted butter
4 eggs
1 1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp lemon extract
2 1/2 cups cake flour
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups water
4 cups powdered sugar
3oz unsweetened chocolate
1 tsp light corn syrup
1 tbsp cocoa

Preheat oven to 375ºF; grease several baking sheets. In a large mixing bowl, beat together butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, milk, vanilla and lemon extract; mix until very liquid, with small chunks of butter. In a medium bowl, combine flours, baking powder and salt; add this mixture to the wet ingredients in 3 additions, stirring until well combined after each addition. Using a soup spoon, place heaping spoonfuls of the dough 2” apart on the baking sheets. Bake 15 minutes, until edges begin to brown, then let cool completely on wire racks. (Do not overbake or cookies will dry out. They also burn easily on the edges.)

Boil the water in a saucepan; to a medium heat-safe bowl, add powdered sugar. Stir in a scant 1/2-2/3 cup of the boiling water to make a thick, spreadable mixture. (Be cautious because a frosting with a too-thin consistency can’t be undone.) Leave remaining water on the stove over low heat. Spread the frosting on one half of each cookie, setting each cookie aside as done; there will be leftover frosting (make sure of it), hopefully about half of what you started with. (If frosting gets stiff or is drying out, stir in 1 tsp of the hot water.) Return saucepan of water to medium heat, bringing it to a simmer; set the bowl of frosting over the saucepan to create a double boiler. Add chocolate and corn syrup to the frosting, stirring gently until melted; add cocoa for a darker color, if you’d like, then turn off heat. Spread the frosting on the other half of each cookie, setting each cookie aside as done. (If frosting gets stiff or too dry, stir in 1 tsp of the hot water.) Serve immediately. Store cookies in an airtight container, with wax paper between layers; they’ll keep for up to a week. Makes 50-60 3” cookies.

Sources:
Sugar – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenuw NW)
Butter, milk, lemon extract & flour – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Eggs – Organic Valley (La Farge, WI)
Vanilla – Madécasse (Brooklyn, NY)
Cake flour – King Arthur Flour (Norwich, VT)
Powdered sugar – Domino Foods (Yonkers, NY)
Chocolate – Sunspire (Lake Success, NY)
Corn Syrup – Wholesome Sweeteners (Sugar Land, TX)
Cocoa – Hershey (Hershey, PA)

Comments:
The classic. That’s all I can say. These cookies have been around for nearly a century, originating in New York City. (I found out that this kind of cookie is made and sold in Germany under the name “Amerikaners.”) Not being from New York, I’ve only had these a few times in my life, but they are certainly distinctive enough that I knew what a good result would be.

And I succeeded. These cookies had their famous texture that’s somewhere between shortbread and cake. The cookie base itself is remarkably flavorful, for which I thank the lemon extract. (My fiancé noted that orange extract would be an interesting alternative.) With the white frosting, these cookies tasted very much like ciarmella—a family cookie recipe with a similarly dense base with a lemon glaze. The lemony notes disappeared under the chocolate frosting, but that’s quite all right. And that is a truly delicious chocolate frosting.

There is one drawback to these cookies and that’s the labor involved. Not in the cookie dough and baking steps, to be sure. But frosting these babies is a lot of work because you have to do each cookie twice. That turns into a load of work if you’ve made about 50 of them. In fact, the recipe I used recommends not making them any smaller than three inches, or you might just lose your mind frosting them all. You may also run out of trays and flat surfaces on which to put them. There’s a reason that these cookies are very big when made by professional bakers and commercial bakeries: they’re considerably easier to frost that way.

But little matter, in the end. The cookies’ taste makes up for it. These are rich and delicious things to munch on. First the side covered in the white icing, leaving about a half inch; then the side covered in chocolate icing, also leaving a half inch; and then munching up the middle bit. You could say this is a sophisticated cookie that gives one a taste for eating it like a five-year-old.

The Longest Day

We’ve suffered enough at the hands of the Wintersmith,
All had our fill of the frost on the ground.
Let’s drink to the health of the fair Summer Lady
And wish her the best as she draws the sun down.

Go back to your mountains, you cold-hearted lover!
Your magic is broken, your mischief is done!
The time is at hand for the fair Summer Lady
To take up her place and to draw the sun down.

Let the seasons turn,
Let the rivers start a-flowing,
Let the hot sun burn
And melt our frozen hearts.

Too long have we lived in the clutches of Winter;
Too long have we lived in the grip of the cold.
One wave of her hand and the fair Summer Lady
Will turn the white fields into yellow and gold.

To breeze through the corn on the first day in springtime,
To lie under skies of magnificent blue.
Just look in the eyes of the fair Summer Lady:
She’ll harvest our dreams and she’ll make them come true.

Let the seasons turn,
Let the rivers start a-flowing,
Let the hot sun burn
And melt our frozen hearts.

Let the warm winds blow,
Send the North Wind on his journey,
Sweep away the snow!
The Summer Lady’s here!

She’ll smile on the hillside;
She’ll dance on the lake;
She’ll shimmer with brightness
When she is awake.
She can turn the sun blood red
In a hot burning sky.
But when summer is over,
The Lady must die.

So drink to the health of the fair Summer Lady,
Bathe in her glory and be of good cheer.
As sure as the summer is followed by winter,
We’ll call on the Lady of Summer each year.

Let the seasons turn,
Let the rivers start a-flowing,
Let the hot sun burn
And melt our frozen hearts.

Let the warm winds blow,
Send the North Wind on his journey,
Sweep away the snow!
The Summer Lady’s here!
-Steeleye Span, “The Summer Lady,” Wintersmith

–––

Italian Salad with Cooked Dandelion Greens

For the Salad:
50ml olive oil
13g minced garlic (3 cloves)
150g stemmed dandelion greens (1 large bunch)
165g cored & shredded radicchio (1 medium head)
360g trimmed curly endive, in 1.5” pieces (1 large head; aka frisée)
305g chopped red onion (1 medium)
180g halved cherry tomatoes
38g cooked & crumbled bacon (6 slices)

For the Dressing:
175ml olive oil
90ml balsamic vinegar
30ml orange juice

For the salad: heat oil in a large skillet or pot over medium heat. Add garlic; sauté 30-60 seconds, until fragrant. Add dandelion; cook 2-3 minutes, stirring continuously, until wilted. Transfer dandelion and garlic to a paper towel-lined plate; set aside until just warmer than room temperature. In a large salad bowl, toss together radicchio, endive, onion, tomatoes, bacon and cooked dandelion. For the dressing: whisk together oil, vinegar and orange juice in a bowl until thickened. Just before serving, pour dressing over salad, tossing lightly to coat. Serve immediately.

Yield: 1.2kg salad (295ml dressing)
Cooking time: 90 minutes
Vegetarian: no (but can be made vegan without the bacon)
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Salads
Date prepared: 14 June, 2014
Rating: ***

Sources:
Oil (cooking) – Filippo Berio (Lucca, Italy)
Garlic – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Dandelion – Cal-Organic (Bakersfield, CA)
Radicchio & endive – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Onion & orange – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Cherry tomatoes – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Bacon – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Oil (dressing) – Columela (Cordoba, Spain)
Vinegar – Antica Italia (Modena, Italy)

Comments:
A lovely salad––as long as you like bitter greens. My fiancé doesn’t, so this salad was something of a nightmare for him. I, however, love them, so this was quite enjoyable. I only wish I could have gotten more market greens. There are plenty of good salad mixes available now, as well as some spinach, but no one had the key ingredient––dandelion––or curly endive.

A note on the endive: like leeks and radish greens, curly endive very easily hides lots of dirt. I probably spent a good 15 minutes washing the endive, and I still missed some. (Not enough to wreck the salad, by any means, but enough to make me kick myself a bit.)

The cooked dandelion greens are the centerpiece of the salad, and they are lovely. Especially with the orange-infused balsamic vinaigrette. I must say, adding a bit of orange juice to balsamic vinegar makes a masterful dressing. The orange enriches and deepens the flavor of the vinegar in a way that, say, lemon wouldn’t. I liked the way the two ingredients worked together in the same way I like the combination of chocolate and orange. (Because I’m thoroughly convinced that balsamic vinegar is chocolate sauce for grown-ups.)

I actually added the tomatoes, since I’d gotten too many for a pasta dish this week (see below), and wanted a way to use them apart from munching them like popcorn. Now that I think about it, I need to find ways to use the abundances of cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash that are present at my two farmers’ markets now. (Redbud Farm, at the Broad Branch Market, has these adorable, silver-dollar-sized pattypan squashes. Those would make for a lovely presentation.)

By the way, the garlic is a must with the dandelion. Those two things go together beautifully when sautéed. In other words, do not skimp on the garlic. Or the bacon. Because everything is better with some crumbled bacon.

While the salad is quite nice when chilled, I think it would get a better rating if it were served with the dandelions and bacon freshly cooked and still quite warm. There is something to warm salads (as the French well know with their classic salade du chèvre chaud), rather than salads that are bone-cold out of the fridge. Warm salads are especially appreciated in the early summer, when evenings are still a bit cool. In this salad, I think the rich vinaigrette would really enhance the warm ingredients, making this quite a filling meal.

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Oyster & Mushroom Soup

290g chopped bacon (14 slices)
180g chopped shallots (3 medium-large)
425g sliced cremini mushrooms
355ml dry vermouth
210g shucked & drained oysters
1.1L whole milk
120ml heavy cream
salt & pepper to taste
20g minced tarragon (more for garnish)
large pinch of dry mustard
grated zest of 2 lemons (garnish)

Set a pot over medium-high heat; once hot, add bacon and cook 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add shallots and mushrooms; sauté 2-3 minutes. Add vermouth, stir well, then cover pot; cook 2-3 minutes, until boiling. Add oysters, milk, cream, salt and pepper. Reduce heat to medium, cover pot and bring to a light simmer; let simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add tarragon and mustard; turn off heat and let soup stand, covered, for 5 minutes. Serve hot, garnished with lemon zest and more minced tarragon.

Yield: 2.3L
Cooking time: 70 minutes
Vegetarian: no
Source: 12 Months of Monastery Soups
Date prepared: 14 June, 2014
Rating: ****

Sources:
Bacon – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Shallots & lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Mushrooms – Mother Earth (Landenberg, PA)
Vermouth – Dolin, Vermouth de Chambéry (Savoy, France)
Oysters – Bay Shore Brand, Harris Seafood Co. (Grasonville, MD)
Milk – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Cream – Organic Valley (La Farge, WI)
Tarragon – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Mustard – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)

Comments:
Any dish that requires the inclusion of oysters already scores high on the decadence scale. Any dish that requires bacon and cream will be richly dense on the palate. And any dish that is sprinkled with a bit of lemon zest and tarragon will have some unusual flair. Thus it is with this remarkably atypical, and highly flavorful, soup.

When I was describing this soup to my fiancé, he laughingly asked, “So it’s basically Oysters Rockefeller in soup form, right?” Pretty much. And it makes for a lovely treat––a break from my (still high-level) run-of-the-mill soups. If you can have something like this, why would you ever eat soup from a can?

Now, this soup doesn’t require a lot of oysters. Which is just fine, since they’re fairly expensive. But their flavor makes them punch above their weight in the soup pot. The oysters fully infuse the soup with their flavor, without ever making it smell or taste unpleasantly “fishy.”

The rich, deep flavors of the soup also come from the mushrooms and bacon. (And the bacon was my addition, since I had a lot leftover from the salad.) There’s very little that smells better than shallots and mushrooms being fried with bacon, particularly when the aromatic vermouth has just been tossed in. (There’s also very little that tastes better. Resist the temptation to eat the not-quite-soup at this stage.) They may offset whatever “fishiness” the oysters bring, giving the soup a very earthy undertone. Nice “land and sea,” or “surf and turf,” effect.

While these big basic elements set the tone and theme of the soup, don’t underestimate the small things here. The tarragon and lemon zest add their own descant notes, heightening the soup’s aroma. And we shouldn’t forget the milk and cream, which are what really make this soup stick to your ribs. But just be careful with the heat both when you add the dairy and while the soup cooks with it. Let the soup simmer, but not boil (oops!), or the cream will curdle. It doesn’t ruin the soup, but it makes for a smoother presentation.

I know I pledged recently to start making soups that were considerably more in line with the seasons (and thus lighter), rather than these rich ones that are more suited to winter. But when life presents you the opportunity to make a soup like this, take it.

P.S. The croutons were my idea for a garnish, since I had some leftover bread from dinner that weekend. They worked quite well to add some volume to the soup––which was appreciated because this recipe doesn’t make a lot.

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Saumon aux Poireaux Crémeux et au Beurre de Vin Rouge

For the Red Wine Butter:
1 cup red wine
1 chopped shallot
6 tbsp softened unsalted butter, in 1 tbsp slices

For the Creamed Leeks:
2 tbsp diced unsalted butter
2 julienned leeks (white & light green parts only)
1 tbsp chopped oregano
1 tbsp chopped thyme
1 tsp crushed fennel seeds
1/3 cup dry vermouth
2 cups heavy cream
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt & pepper to taste

For the Salmon:
2 8oz skin-on, boneless salmon fillets
1 diced shallot
3 tbsp olive oil
1 minced garlic clove

For red wine butter: combine wine and shallot in a 1qt saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat; let boil 13 minutes, until liquid is reduced to 1-2 tbsp. Strain wine into a bowl through a fine sieve to remove shallot; discard shallot and let wine cool to room temperature. Add butter to wine; stir with a fork until well combined. Transfer butter mixture to a sheet of plastic wrap; roll tightly into a 1.5”-thick cylinder, then twist ends of plastic wrap to seal tightly. Chill until firm; keeps for a week in the fridge.

For the creamed leeks: melt butter in a 12” skillet over medium-high heat. Add leeks, oregano, thyme and fennel; cook 2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until slightly wilted. Add vermouth; cook 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until almost all liquid has evaporated. Reduce heat to medium; add cream and lemon juice, stirring well. Increase heat back to medium-high and season with salt and pepper; cook 15-20 minutes, until leeks are thoroughly softened and cream has been well-reduced and thickened. (Reduce heat to medium if cream is boiling away too rapidly.)

For the salmon: preheat oven to 275º. In a small bowl, mix together shallot, oil and garlic; rub mixture all over salmon. Place salmon in a 9×13” baking dish; season lightly with salt and pepper. Roast salmon 12 minutes, until medium rare. Divide red wine butter into quarters; place two quarters on each salmon fillet. Return salmon to oven for 3 minutes, to slightly melt the butter. To serve, divide creamed leeks between two plates; set a salmon fillet, with the butter, beside the leeks. Serves 2.

Sources:
Wine – Château Haut-Piquat, Famille Rivière (Lussac Saint-Emilion, Bordeaux, France)
Shallots – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Butter & fennel seed – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Oil – Filippo Berio (Lucca, Italy)
Parsley, leeks, garlic, lemon & salmon – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Oregano & thyme – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Vermouth – Dolin, Vermouth de Chambéry (Savoy, France)
Cream – Organic Valley (La Farge, WI)

Comments:
I think this dish looks more complicated than it actually is, in terms of prep. Then again, I’ve never made my own pat of butter before; it’s rather fun. Not to mention tasty. As is the rest of this dish, particularly the creamed leeks.

This recipe gives you one really great bonus: it looks very elegant without a tremendous amount of work. You get to lay out a lovely fillet of orange-pink salmon next to a golden yellow side dish, and top it with purple butter. That makes for a very colorful plate.

I know I keep saying that this isn’t a long-prep dish. And it’s true. Every step is a familiar one, and as long as you stir the leeks every few minutes, once you get to the stove, you don’t have much to do. To that end, I’d highly recommend making the butter in advance, especially if you plan to serve this on a weeknight or a Friday after work. There’s just not enough time to get the butter to firm up before you’d have to serve everything else.

While the dish as a whole is quite tasty, the standout on the plate is the creamed leeks. They were quite stunning. Herbaceous, and textured rather like macaroni and cheese, this leek dish is definitely something I’d make again. Probably in the autumn or winter, when warm, rich and cheesy foods are particularly appreciated. You may also find yourself amazed at how the cream thickens and evaporates, leaving a judiciously-seasoned and sumptuous side dish in its wake. Side dish? Nah. I could eat a bowlful of this stuff.

The salmon itself was also nice, but unfortunately paled next to the leeks. This could be remedied by using a salted variety of butter for the infused stuff, just for a seasoning kick. On the other hand, the fish’s density means this dish balances itself very, very well. What I mean here is that the dense salmon and rich leeks set off each other wonderfully (though the dish was a bit oily). This is not a dish to diet with. It’s strong in the decadence arena.

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Linguine con Pettini, Finocchio e Pomodori

9oz fresh linguine
3 tbsp olive oil
1 large fennel bulb, quartered & very thinly sliced (fronds reserved)
1 medium yellow onion, halved & thinly sliced
1 lb bay scallops (10-20 count)
6oz halved cherry tomatoes
1 tbsp ouzo
4 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped fennel fronds
salt & pepper to taste
1 lemon, in 4 wedges
grated parmesan

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat; add linguine and cook until barely al dente, then drain. Meanwhile, heat 2 tbsp oil in a pot (or large skillet) over medium-high heat; add fennel and onion. Sauté 6 minutes, until fennel is wilted but crisp-tender and onion is limp; with a slotted spoon, transfer onion and fennel to a medium bowl. Add remaining oil to skillet; add scallops. Sauté 2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until just barely cooked in the center; with a slotted spoon, transfer to bowl with onion and fennel. Add tomatoes to skillet; sauté 2 minutes, until broken down. Return scallops, onion and fennel to skillet; stir in ouzo. Add drained linguine, tossing to coat; stir in parsley and fennel fronds. Transfer to a serving bowl and serve with lemon wedges and grated parmesan. Serves 2.

Sources:
Linguine – Me!
Oil – Filippo Berio (Lucca, Italy)
Fennel – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Onion & lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Scallops & parsley – Whole Foods Market (4530 40th Street NW)
Tomatoes – Valencia’s Produce (Montrose, VA; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)
Ouzo – S. & E. & A. Metaxa (Kifissia, Greece)

Comments:
One of my favorite summer dishes is pasta of any sort with basil pesto. And I know it’s about time to buy lots of basil, purée it with some garlic and parmesan, and stock up on it in the freezer. That way I can take a tupperware out of the freezer in January, thaw it out and enjoy a bit of summer in the depths of winter.

Why am I talking about basil pesto? Because this pasta dish makes a phenomenal alternative, and is about as green to boot. I’m not sure it unseats basil pesto as my favorite, since it has considerably more prep and you can’t make it for the freezer. But this is a dish with a remarkable flavor of fresh green, and it’s easy enough to put together for a quick supper.

This dish could also inspire a version of pesto featuring fennel fronds. Because God knows you end up with vast quantities of them when you only use the bulb. What do you do with all of them? I hang-dried them from my spice rack for a few days, then crumbled them by hand. Now I have dried fennel for as long as I need it.

The scallops also have quite a presence, of course. I was hoping to get smaller ones for this recipe, but I realized that smaller scallops could end up overcooked and chewy––a fairly easy stumble when cooking them. The cooking time and temperature were perfect, however, for the 10-20 count scallops I had. They ended up having a wonderful balance of tenderness and meatiness, and their density helped give the dish some textural heft that I think it would otherwise have lacked.

This is a dish, actually, with carefully balanced textures, now that I think about it. You want the fennel to be just past crisp-tender on its way to pasta-style “al dente”-ness; you don’t want it to be too crispy, nor do you want it to be soft. The onions get to be limp, and your teeth should be able to slide right through the scallops like a knife through softened butter. In short, there should be some contrasting textures, but not opposing contrasts.

I should note that you have options on what sort of liquor you add. The original recipe calls for Pernod, but depending on your budget, ouzo can be a fine substitute. Other anise liqueurs could also work, though I’d stay away from the very sweet ones like sambuca. This isn’t a dish that’s supposed to be fruity. The ouzo, and tomatoes too, are there to help aromatize everything.

Speaking of liquor, I served this summery pasta dish with a wine recommended to me by the good people at Calvert Woodley. It was a Spanish moscatel seco, “dry muscat,” by Jorge Ordóñez in Málaga, called Botani. And it was a delicious wine––a very vigorous white. Now, I said that your dish isn’t supposed to be fruity, but the wine you serve it with can be. (In fact, the original recipe recommended a dry muscat.) The Botani had that in spades, along with a barely-there sensation of effervescence. (Muscat, or moscato, is frequently used in Italian sparkling wines.) It was also a crisp wine, and semi-dry––so it was also semi-sweet. Somehow the sweet fruitiness worked as a great partner to the dish. In bringing out the herbal aromas and flavors of this dish, Botani lived up to its name.

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Turbot aux Concombres et l’Aneth

2 medium cucumbers, halved, seeded & thinly sliced
salt & pepper to taste
2 minced garlic cloves
2 minced shallots
2/3 cup minced dill
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup dry white wine
1.5 lb turbot fillets (2 large)

Preheat oven to 425ºF; grease a 9×13” baking dish. Cut a 9×13” piece of parchment; set aside. Line bottom of baking dish with half the cucumber slices; sprinkle with 1/3 of the dill, seasoning lightly with salt and pepper. Lay turbot on top of cucumber; season lightly with salt and pepper. Sprinkle turbot with garlic and shallots; sprinkle with 1/3 dill. Drizzle turbot with the oil and half the lemon juice; top with remaining cucumbers. Add remaining lemon juice, then sprinkle with remaining dill; drizzle with wine. Cover with parchment; cover baking dish tightly with foil. Bake 15 minutes, until fish is opaque and flaky. Transfer turbot fillets to individual plates; spoon liquid from the baking dish over the top. Serves 2-4.

Sources:
Cucumbers – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV, Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road)
Garlic & turbot – Whole Foods (4530 40th Street NW)
Shallots & lemon – Broad Branch Market (5608 Broad Branch Road NW)
Dill – G. Flores Produce (UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street)
Oil – Columela (Cordoba, Spain)
Wine – Pinot grigio, Tomaiolo (Tuscany, Italy)

Comments:
Looks like it was a seafood weekend around here.

This dish needed more of something. Concentration of flavor, I think. Though it looked fabulous when I took it out of the oven. And it was good, but could have been so much more.

The problem here is that the turbot was steamed. Fish is always substantially better when baked, roasted or grilled. Steamed things simply taste too watery to me, because the simple fact of the technique itself—covering the dish—means that moisture can’t escape. If moisture can’t escape, the flavors of the dish can’t concentrate, thanks to reduction by evaporation. Straight-up roasting might have worked better here, even if that risked the fish flaking too much. But given how much liquid is in a slice of cucumber, you need to find some way to dump moisture, or this will just taste bland.

The original recipe actually features halibut. And I was even able to find the first halibut of the season at the store. Except, at $30 per pound, it’s not exactly in my budget. Turbot is a good substitute, as I read, and is significantly less expensive.

One thing that did occur to me is that a meatier fish would also have helped here. Think salmon. It obviously goes well with dill and cucumber, at least in its smoked form. But I think it would work well here; it would likely be a better roasting or baking fish, for a start.

Still, this dish wasn’t a total loss. It’s hard to beat the presentation. And the strongest seasoning was the garlic, which I always appreciate. This dish has potential and is worth restructuring on a second try.

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Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies

14.75oz flour
2 tsp baking soda
4 tsp ginger
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp cocoa
16 tbsp unsalted butter
12oz blackstrap molasses
7oz dark brown sugar
12oz semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 325ºF; grease rimmed baking sheets. In a bowl, combine flour, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, salt and cocoa; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer; beat butter and sugar until well-creamed together; add molasses, beating until combined. Beat in dry ingredients; remove bowl from mixer stand and stir in chocolate chips. Drop dough by the heaping tablespoon onto baking sheets, 1.5” apart. Bake 12 minutes, until surface begins to crack; remove from oven, cool on baking sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Makes 54 cookies.

Sources:
Flour & butter – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Ginger, cloves & nutmeg – 365 Organics (Austin, TX)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Cocoa – Hershey (Hershey, PA)
Molasses – Plantation, Allied Old English (Port Reading, NJ)
Sugar – Domino Foods (Yonkers, NY)
Chocolate chips – Ghirardelli (San Francisco, CA)

Comments:
When I first took these cookies out of the oven, I was initially worried. They were so dark as to be just about black; I thought they’d burned. But they hadn’t. That was just one very, very dark batter. It was the color of truly dark chocolate, and tasted like decadent luxury itself.

On the other hand, the cookies didn’t 100% work. They spread out far too much in the oven, making them ultra crispy and very thin once baked. Too much so, unfortunately, though the chocolate chips helped on that front.

Here’s what I think happened: the cookie dough was too loose and thin to really be dough. It looked and felt more like a dense cake batter. I don’t know if it was because my kitchen was too hot and/or humid and made the batter melt a bit. Or it could have been an insufficient amount of leavening. There are no eggs in this recipe, for instance. Or the fact that I simply greased the cookie sheets instead of using parchment; but I’m not sure that would have been enough to stop the cookies from melting together. Or perhaps I could have baked them for a few minutes less––ten minutes instead of twelve––to head off some of the crispness problem.

This actually makes me wonder what this recipe would be like as a cake.

Now, the cookies weren’t ruined. But they weren’t as good as they might have been. Their flavor was utterly splendid, even if their texture was too dry. It isn’t easy to find such rich-tasting cookies, for which I can thank the molasses. I’ll definitely be giving this recipe another try. This is worth trying to get right.

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Strawberry Bread

3 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 cups sugar
1 1/4 cup canola oil
4 eggs
4 cups chopped strawberries
1/2 cup strawberry jam

Preheat oven to 350ºF; grease 2 9×5” loaf pans, then dust with flour and set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt; set aside. In another bowl, whisk together sugar, oil and eggs. Pour wet ingredients into dry, whisking until just combined; stir in strawberries. Divide batter between loaf pans; spoon 1/4 cup jam over each loaf, then lightly swirl into batter. Bake 60-75 minutes, until a tester inserted in the middle of the loaves comes out clean. Let loaves cool 30 minutes in pans before removing, slicing and serving. Makes 2 loaves.

Sources:
Flour & canola – Giant Food (4303 Connecticut Avenue NW)
Cinnamon – McCormick & Co. (Sparks, MD)
Sugar – Domino Foods (Yonkers, NY)
Eggs – Whitmore Farm (Emmitsburg, MD; Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road NW)
Jam – Redbud Organic Farm (Haroun Hallack & Clarissa Mathews; Inwood, WV, Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road)
Strawberries – Redbud Organic Farm & G. Flores Produce (Broad Branch Farmers’ Market, 5701 Broad Branch Road; UDC Farmers’ Market, Connecticut Avenue & Yuma Street NW)

Comments:
“Quick bread” is a name that’s something of a mystery to me. Because they take a long time to bake. And this one required a fair amount of prep to chop all the strawberries.

On the other hand, all that time and effort was very much worth it. This was the best loaf of breakfast bread I’ve had in a very long time. Now, I’ve always liked loaves like these; homemade banana bread was a breakfast mainstay when I was growing up. (Along with the occasional loaf of pumpkin bread, as well as zucchini breads from my grandmother. I’ve also made molasses bread.) But this recipe is emblematic––the platonic ideal––of breakfast breads.

It’s got just the right amount of moisture in the bread, even without the added jam. (Though the jam helps in that regard. On the other hand, the jam is what makes the loaf need so long to bake.) It’s also got the right amount of sweetness in the bread, balanced next to the sweetness of the fruit and jam. This loaf in particular had a lovely combination of a strong cinnamon flavor with the strawberries. I ordinarily don’t think of strawberries and cinnamon going together, but after tasting this loaf, I think strawberries dunked in cinnamon-sugar would be a miraculous snack.

My timing in making this loaf was also fortuitous. I made the two loaves a week ago to freeze (deciding to write about them when I’d actually eaten them), and when I went to my next farmers’ market, all the strawberries were gone! So this was an excellent way to preserve that late spring bounty of berries. Don’t shed too many tears for strawberries, however, even if they did have a short-ish season. Blueberries have been in full swing for awhile, and cherries are just beginning to make an appearance. We’ll be eating well for a long while now.

I should note that I only have one loaf pan, so I had to decide what to do with the other half of the batter. I initially thought about waiting to bake it until the first loaf was out of the one pan, but I didn’t want to leave my oven on for so long on a hot day. (Given how long it took to bake and cool the first loaf, this was the wiser choice.) So I poured the rest of the batter into a 9” cake pan and put that in the oven. It took half the time the loaf took to bake, which was nice. It also ended up denser, which made for a more cakey experience. But this “cake” was still solidly in breakfast territory, rather than dessert. However you make it, though, be prepared for a treat that really highlights what strawberries are capable of. What a lovely way to start the morning!