Wednesday: Trouts and tarts

Rainbow trout baked with fennel, carrot and sweet peppers.

We improvised this bake to take advantage of the sweet, fatty flavor of upstate rainbow trout, which bears some resemblance to salmon.  (On the basis of that resemblance, we also added a generous amount of dill.)  We sauteed the vegetables with some onion before layering them over the fish in a casserole, and then baked it at 350F for about fifteen minutes.  We probably could have gotten away with a minute or two less - but this all depends on the size of the fish.

We also had a special dessert tonight: a red currant tart, cooked in the brand new ramekins we acquired thanks to Giselle's end-of-law-school Westlaw Points redemption extravaganza.

Tuesday: "Snow" peas?? In the middle of June? Take that, Al Gore!

 

 Stir-fry of purple snow peas, carrots, crimini mushroom and tofu, served over rice.

If you have vegetable odds and ends on hand, a stir fry is usually within reach.  We actually bought these beautiful purple snow peas in contemplation of a stir fry, so we picked up some mushrooms as well.

Tuesday: Kinpira redux

Carrot-burdock kinpira with pan-fried tofu and rice.

Kinpira has already appeared on the blog: we're officially on the market for another burdock recipe, though this one is pretty great. 

In other burdock-related news, we were walking through the park the other day and realized that a few plants looked strangely familiar.  In fact, they looked just like the burdock tops we cooked recently.  As it turns out, burdock is growing all over the park!  We found several first-year plants, with their smaller, edible leaves, as well as a few second-year plants, which send up a huge stem and grow flowers and burrs.  One of them is about our height. 

Thursday: Where's the chicken?

Polenta with braised maitake mushrooms and parmesan, served with sweet-spiced carrots with chickweed.

What would we do without Elizabeth Schneider's Vegetables: From Amaranth to Zucchini? We don't know. Both of these recipes come from her book, which is always our go-to source when we encounter a wholly new veggie (or fungus, as the case may be). Chickweed, another foraged spring green, has a flavor reminiscent of cornsilk when raw, but it wilted into a mild, chewy mass when mixed with simmered carrots, ginger powder and allspice. It was traditionally given to chickens, who apparently like it - hence the name. Maitake, also known as "hen of the woods," has a meaty - even gamy - flavor and aroma. Here it was braised with garlic, rosemary and sherry, and used as a topping for soft polenta.

(We suppose the use of chickweed and hen-of-the-woods mushroom makes this a chicken-themed meal, despite the lack of actual chicken.)

As a belated celebration of Giselle's last-EVER day of law school classes, we cracked open this pretty bottle of dandelion wine:


Bottle of wine, fruit of the dandelion

Giselle has been curious about dandelion wine for years, ever since reading the Ray Bradbury book of the same name. It really is made with dandelion petals, mixed with sugar, a souring agent, and some other substances which assist in fermentation. (As the man at the Chateau Rennaisance stand told us, "it takes a lot of flowers.") Dandelion wine did not disappoint: it was lightly herbal but not over-sweet like some fruit wines can be, and not at all flowery. It was more similar to a mildly sweet white grape wine than you might think.

Saturday lunch: Grasping the nettle

Stir-fry of stinging nettles, ramps, carrots and chickpeas, served over basmati rice.

We've seen nettles at the market over the last year or two, but we've been too intimidated to try them out - until now. Yes, they really are "stinging" nettles - if you brush against the leaves, you will get a painful sting which can linger from hours to days. According to Wikipedia, these little leafies have micro-needles which inject you with formic acid, serotonin, histamine, and a couple other nasty chemicals. Luckily, mincing (VERY fine), sauteeing, soaking or boiling the leaves destroys the chemicals that cause the sting. Humans must have figured that out pretty early on, because nettles are a rather ancient food: they are useful as yet another veggie that appears early in the season when few other things are ready for harvest.

We swiped this recipe idea from the excellent food politics blog La Vida Locavore. It's simple - which is what we wanted for our first nettle experience. You may be wondering how one prepares nettles, given that you can't touch them without being stung. The answer: latex gloves. No, seriously.


Nettle leaves separated from inedible stems

It sounds like a lot of trouble to wear gloves just to prep some greens, but these guys were really worth the fuss. They have a deep, interesting flavor once cooked (when raw they smell haylike), and they retain a pleasantly chewy texture even after sauteeing.

Sunday lunch: Kasha kapers

Kasha with carrots, served with deviled eggs.

Kasha (otherwise known as toasted buckwheat groats) made a nice warm grain salad when cooked with some of the many carrots still taking up space in our fridge. In keeping with the Eastern European vibe, we decided on some simple deviled eggs topped with paprika as an accompaniment.

Sunday dinner: Brought to you by the color orange

Pan-fried grey flounder with roasted sweet potato and gingered carrot-pea salad.

This time, we dredged the fish fillets in a little flour before pan-frying, and served them with fresh lemon juice. The carrots here were diced very fine - almost like those ridiculous mixed vegetable salads you'd find in a school lunch side dish - and simmered with peas, fresh grated ginger, and a little sugar, giving them a lightly sweet dressing.

Tuesday: Two-bean soup

Barley soup with green beans, carrot and white beans.

This warm and wintry soup was made with our frozen green beans. Soup is a nice application for them - they have a good flavor, but it's impossible to replicate the texture of fresh green beans.

Tuesday: Black-eyed pea and kale soup

Black-eyed pea and kale soup.

The earthiness of kale and black-eyed peas make them a natural match, and indeed they are often found together in Southern cooking. Here we pieced together a soup loosely following the recipes here and here. This was basically a dump and stir, but we did use our new dried thyme, in addition to a pinch of smoky paprika, as the seasoning.

Thursday: Mung Dal and Pickles

Mung dal on brown rice with carrot-mustard seed salad and local pickles.

We've blogged about mung dal before - this is one of our standby dal preparations, taken from Madhur Jaffrey's Invitation to Indian Cooking. Here, we served the dal with rice, pickles, and a salad of grated carrots and mustard seeds. (Mustard seeds must be toasted in oil until they pop or else they have almost no flavor.) The wax bean pickles were recently obtained from Norwich Meadow Farms, and the cucumber pickles were purchased from Rick's Picks at the Union Square greenmarket. Both are highly recommended.

Since this dal recipe is so simple and versatile, we feel compelled to share it with you, faithful readers:

Moong Dal

1.5 c moong dal (hulled and split)
2 cloves garlic, peeled
2 slices peeled fresh ginger, 1 inch square and 1/8 inch thick
1 tsp chopped cilantro
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/4 - 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1.5 tsp salt
1.5 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp vegetable oil or usli ghee
pinch ground asafetida
1 tsp whole cumin seeds
lemon or lime wedges

Clean and wash the dal thoroughly. Put the dal in a heavy-bottomed 3- to 4-quart pot, add 5 cups water, and bring to a boil. Remove the froth and scum that collects at the top. Now add the garlic, ginger, parsley, tuermic, and cayenne pepper. Cover, leaving the lid very slightly ajar, lower heat, and simmer gently for about 1.5 hours. Stir occasionally at first, and more frequently toward the end to prevent the dal from sticking on the bottom of the pot. When the dal is cooked (it should be thicker than pea soup), add the salt and lemon juice.

In a 4- to 6-inch skillet or small pot, heat the oil or ghee over a medium-high flame. When the oil is hot, add the asafetida and cumin seeds. As soon as the asafetida sizzles and expands and the cumin seeds turn dark (this will take only a few seconds), pour the oil and spices over the dal and cover immediately. Let sit for a minute or so and then stir thoroughly before serving.

Notes:

1. This recipe works for mung/moong dal, toor/toovar dal, masoor dal, and urad dal. Urad and moon dal are available with or without their hulls; hulled might be preferable, but you can actually use either in this recipe.

2. Serve the dal with rice and lemon or lime wedges. It's best to have something to go with the dal, like a vegetable dish and pickles. (Pickles are traditionally used to add a salty crunch to an otherwise mushy meal.)

Super Bowl Sunday (with Gumbo!)

Vegetarian gumbo with homemade crackers.

Gumbo is a thick soup, really more of a stew, which puts the natural sliminess of okra to good use. It comes to us from Louisiana, and so we felt it was appropriate to make as we cheered on the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV.

We had always thought of okra as the defining constituent of gumbo, but Wikipedia informs us that either okra or filé powder can be used as the thickener. (Filé powder is dried, ground sassafras leaves - we have yet to add it to our spice collection.) The recipe that we (loosely) followed actually called for both. Apparently this is not very authentic, nor is the addition of tofu. Gumbo would typically include shellfish, pork, or poultry.

In addition to the okra and/or filé powder, a roux base is used to make gumbo just a little bit thicker. To make a roux, flour is cooked in butter or oil over medium-low heat until it reaches the desired color, which can range from golden (a light roux) to copper-brown (a dark roux). Here, we started the gumbo with a dark roux.

To go with the gumbo, Giselle made crackers following Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. These made use of our half-white flour from Cayuga Pure Organics, and they were topped with salt and nigella seeds.

Saturday: Vegetarian Chili

Vegetarian chili with smoky paprika.

Lizz is down with flu-like symptoms, so dinner tonight was this very simple chili.

Friday: This is your brain on tofu

Scrambled tofu with bell pepper, green beans and carrots.

By "scrambled tofu," we really just mean a stir fry with hard tofu crumbled in and cooked gently until warmed through. This is an easy way to use up odds and ends of vegetables you have lying around. In addition to a little ginger and garlic sauteed to start, we seasoned with some soy sauce at the end.

Tuesday: Kasha with mushroom and chickpea

Kasha with mushroom and chickpeas, served with carrot-parsley salad.

What is kasha, you ask? Well, you may also see it called "toasted buckwheat groats," but somehow that doesn't have much of a ring to it. Like quinoa, buckwheat is actually not related to wheat at all, but rather is a seed that bears some resemblance to other grains. You might encounter it in gluten-free versions of products typically made with normal wheat - but we know it best as the main ingredient in Japanese soba noodles. Kasha has an earthy, nutty flavor that melds well with mushrooms, chickpeas, and lightly caramelized onions in this dish.

Thanks to our two CSAs, we currently have more carrots than we know what to do with. We made this quick carrot-parsley salad (in a simple lemon juice-olive oil marinade) to add some fresh veggie flavor and a texture contrast to the main dish.

Meanwhile, check out the gams on this carrot:

Friday: D4SA Dumplings

Cabbage-carrot gyoza dumplings with fried tofu and rice.

Another D4SA first - homemade dumplings. Gyoza are Japanese dumplings typically filled with pork and scallions, shrimp, or other meats. (Their Chinese incarnation is often called "potstickers.") Usually they're light-colored - ours are brown because we used the half-white flour we got this week from Cayuga Pure Organics. This isn't really a weeknight meal, but they're much easier to make than their cute shape might imply.

VEGETARIAN GYOZA DUMPLINGS

For the dough:

In a bowl, mix 2 cups all-purpose flour and 1/2 cup water. When it comes together, turn out and knead the dough on a floured surface for about 3 minutes. Then shape into a ball, cover with a damp towel, and let rest 10 minutes. After that, knead for 3 more minutes and then roll the dough into a long snake about one inch in diameter. Cut that roll into 24 pieces - each piece will make one gyoza wrapper.
For each piece, press it with your palm to flatten, and then use a rolling pin to roll it into a pancake about three inches wide. You can cut it with the rim of a glass if you want a nice round shape, but it's not really necessary.

For the filling:

Meanwhile, chop up one small head cabbage and a bit over half a pound of carrots. Cut the veggies very fine: the cabbage should be sliced thinly and should not be in very long strips, and the carrot should be cut into very thin, small sticks. (You just want them to be small enough to fit inside the dumplings easily!)
Heat peanut oil in a skillet, and when it's hot add the carrots and saute for several minutes until they have begun to soften. Then add the cabbage and saute for about one minute. Add four teaspoons soy sauce and two teaspoons mirin, and stir and fry for about five minutes, until the vegetables are wilted and melded together. (You could vary this by adding some grated ginger, crumbled tofu, toasted sesame seeds...etc.)

To make the dumplings:

Take a round of dough and place a little of the filling in its center. Fold the circle in half to surround the filling and gently pinch it closed at the top of the half-moon. Then (this is the hardest part) "pleat" the dough on one side of the half-circle to close the dumpling. This is hard to describe without pictures, so we recommend you check out this site to see how it's done.
From this point, the dumpling can be either steamed or pan-fried. We steamed our dumplings in a typical steamer basket for about ten minutes total. They have to be in a single layer in the basket, so it might take a couple batches to finish all your dumplings.

Sunday lunch: Roasted Root Vegetables

A winter favorite: roasted root vegetables.

This easily varied, super-simple recipe is something we make every winter when we find ourselves with odds and ends left in the fridge. It's a way to use up any hard root vegetables you might have on hand - that can include carrots, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes...etc. Don't mix in softer, summer vegetables because they will burn during the time the others need to cook through.

Here's the basic formula, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (D4SA required reading):

Roasted Root Vegetables

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, butter, or a mixture
1 1/2 - 2 lbs mixed root vegetables, peeled and cut into 1 1/2 - 2 inch chunks
several springs fresh thyme, or about 1 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves (optional)
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 head garlic, broken into unpeeled cloves (optional)
onion cut into quarters (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 425F.

2. In a large bowl, toss the chopped root vegetables in the oil and herbs with salt and pepper. Dump onto a baking sheet so that the vegetables are approximately in a single layer.

3. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes, stirring or shaking about every ten minutes.

4. If you are using garlic, DON'T include it from the start - instead, add it at the 30 minute mark. (If you add it earlier, it will burn.)

5. After 30 minutes, continue to check every ten minutes or so until the vegetables are done. It should take about 45 minutes to an hour total, depending on the size of the vegetables and your oven.

Tuesday: Kinpira

Burdock-carrot kinpira* with green cabbage-egg stir fry, served on brown rice.

For those who may be uninitiated, burdock (sometimes labeled by its Japanese name, "gobo") is a long, thin brown root. It can be found at farmer's markets during the colder months, or in some pan-Asian grocery stores. It's an unusual vegetable, with a very earthy, almost herbal flavor. If you decide to try a burdock recipe, make sure to chop or shred it directly into a bowl of water, because it (enzymatically) browns very quickly in the air, which will adversely affect the flavor.

In this particular dish, the burdock and carrot are cut into shavings (a carrot peeler works best), then fried in a little oil. Soy sauce, sugar and red pepper are added and stir-fried until the liquid has almost completely evaporated. The final dish has a delicate, still slightly crunchy texture.

As for the other dish, we finally found another cabbage-and-___ recipe, this time with egg filling in the blank!


*According to our cookbook, "Kinpira" was a "strong and dashing mythical hero of old Japan." But you knew that already.

Thursday: Quick and Easy

Sardine-caper toast with carrot-mustard seed salad.

We were pretty tired this evening, so we just threw together two quick and easy dishes. For the salad, grated carrots were doused in mustard seeds that had been popped in oil. In a classic combination, canned sardines were mashed with a little lemon juice and chopped capers (see here for an example).

We usually use nonpareil capers (the little kind), but today we happened to have the larger, nicer caper berries in the fridge:


Caper berries from the Italian market

Tuesday: Comforting Winter Stew

Chestnut-lentil soup with homemade biscuits.

In our pre-blog life, we had purchased chestnuts a few times and had always roasted them and eaten them plain. But this year we've discovered how versatile chestnuts are in cooking. Perhaps chestnuts have faded from the American culinary memory because of the blight, but good recipe ideas can be found in other countries, particularly Italy and Japan.

This thick soup, really more of a stew, combines chestnuts with brown lentils and carrots. The chestnuts and carrots both add a little sweetness and texture to the otherwise fairly standard lentil soup.

Biscuits are surprisingly easy and quick to make from scratch, and they require very few ingredients. You'll probably see them from time to time on this humble blog.

Thanksgiving 2009: Turkey-free edition

Thanksgiving 2009, clockwise from top: polenta cakes with cranberries, kohlrabi-carrot slaw, prosciutto-wrapped sweet potatoes with sage, pumpkin noodle kugel, garlic-roasted Brussels sprouts in balsamic vinegar, and cranberry-beet sauce.

Welcome to a special traveling edition of D4SA! We cooked this year's Thanksgiving dinner at Lizz's parents' house in Philadelphia. None of us are crazy about turkey, so instead we decided to pick several smaller, mostly-vegetarian dishes that were seasonally appropriate and called on traditional Thanksgiving flavors. For this we relied heavily on this list created by Mark Bittman, author of the standby cookbook How to Cook Everything. It contains tons of ideas for holiday dishes that can be made in advance so that everything isn't competing for the oven at the last minute. Although most of these dishes could be prepared ahead of time, we decided instead to do the traditional Thanksgiving cooking marathon for several hours before dinner. Below are some before-and-after photos of each dish, for your viewing pleasure.

Some beautiful fresh local cranberries:



In a traditional cranberry sauce, the berries are just simmered with water and sugar until they all pop and break down. (Some people add gelatin for a firmer texture.) But Mark Bittman suggested adding sweet and earthy grated beets:



The beet and cranberry are simmered together with a little orange juice, grated orange rind, and maple syrup to taste:



With time the ingredients broke down and combined; the sauce ended up with a naturally and pleasantly thick texture, and a more earthy, complex flavor.


Check out the museum-quality flatware!

For the only meat dish of the meal, we wrapped wedges of pre-boiled sweet potatoes in sheets of prosciutto, enclosing a sage leaf in each one.



The wraps are thrown into the oven to roast briefly, just until they have attained a nice crispy texture.



The pumpkin-noodle kugel required a couple more steps than some of our other dishes, but would have been easy to do if we had started with some frozen pureed pumpkin. Instead we used this beautiful white "moonshine" cooking pumpkin, purchased by Lizz's parents at a local food stand:



The pumpkin was scraped out and cut into quarters, then placed cut side down on a baking sheet and baked until soft. We then scraped out the flesh (using a grapefruit spoon....very high-tech) and pureed it in the blender.



From that point, it was simple to add it to the kugel: we just boiled some egg noodles, and separately mixed eggs, milk, pumpkin puree, melted butter, and cinnamon in a bowl. We then layered the noodles and the milk mixture in a couple large casseroles and topped both with breadcrumbs. The kugel baked for a little under an hour, until a knife inserted in the center came out clean.

Meanwhile, we made the kohlrabi-carrot slaw our faithful readers may remember from its recent appearance on our blog. Here the kohlrabi slices are draining in a colander after being tossed with salt:



For a big holiday meal, it's nice to mix dishes you already know how to cook with ones that are new to you - we enjoyed making the easy kohlrabi dish but also trying out our first kugel.



For a green veggie, we reprised the balsamic Brussels sprouts which were also featured on the blog recently.



We put a twist on the traditional cornbread by instead making Mark Bittman's polenta cakes this year. Polenta can be a soft, creamy "pudding"-like dish or it can appear in a more solid form like this. The final texture is determined by the amount of liquid you add and how long you cook it, but you can also crisp up polenta by pan-frying or (as we did here) broiling the individual pieces. For this recipe we made polenta as usual, using a relatively smaller amount of liquid, and also mixing in some chopped fresh cranberries. After spreading the polenta in a baking dish to cool, we cut it into these little cakes and put them on a baking sheet under the broiler until they became crisp on both sides.



As Bob Dylan once said, behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain - and this meal was no exception. Sadly, Lizz's bicep was a casualty of the baking process. It made some inopportune contact with a hot oven door and now bears a dramatic two-inch-long burn mark.


...but ya shoulda seen the door!

Of course, the meal wouldn't have been complete without dessert. But in this, D4SA had the assistance of a special guest chef - Lizz's dad made one of his famous pies. We had requested pecan, and that is what we got:



For those of our faithful readers who made it this far - we're thankful for you this year!