Friday: An oldie but a goodie

 

Cucumber-purslane salad with chickpeas and pink radish. 

This is our first purslane of the season - we like to make this cool salad with it, dressed in some lemon juice and olive oil.

Friday: Real Mexican Food

Verdolagas con Papas en Salsa de Tomatillo (purslane with potatoes in green sauce).

This excellent recipe comes from the cookbook Meatless Mexican Home Cooking, which you can find in our book list at right. It combines common purslane, a succulent which grows wild throughout North America, with tart tomatillos, a new-world member of the nightshade family. This doesn't look much like the Tex-Mex you find in restaurants, but then, it seems like most real Mexican food doesn't...

Tomatillos come in cute papery husks - like groundcherries, but much larger:



They are usually green, but as you can see there are also mottled purple varieties. They should be firm when purchased, and have a bright, tart taste that mellows into complexity when cooked. In the Northeast you can find them in the late summer. In this recipe, they were boiled whole and then blended with cilantro and other ingredients to make a green sauce.

This dish also ended up looking pretty exciting because we used deep purple potatoes rather than white ones:


Nightshade family reunion

Herbed rice with favas and zucchini-purslane soup....and butter!

Herbed rice with fava beans and zucchini-purslane soup.

Our friend Tom came in from out of town last night (because he happens to like New York) and he kindly joined us for dinner. The rice dish was somewhat like a pilaf, but baked, so that the herbs infused the surrounding rice with flavor. It contained dill, parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes (our substitute for scallions), and we threw in some chopped walnuts at the end for added texture. Lizz picked up local summer squash at the Morningside Heights greenmarket to supplement last week's haul.

For dessert, Lizz also picked up some local blueberries. We were so enchanted with our discovery of last night that we planned to use our last quarter-cup of cream to make whipped cream for a topping. We supplemented it with a little bit of milkfat from the top of a nonhomogenized bottle. However, as Tom graciously whisked the cream with a little sugar, the mixture didn't seem to be reaching the same hard peaks stage we had seen the previous night. And then, in just a couple of seconds, it suddenly turned into THIS:



After we all got done exclaiming in shock and horror at the unexpected transformation, Lizz bravely took a taste, and suggested that perhaps we had just accidentally made butter. It seemed too good to be true that we would stumble on TWO different whipped dairy products within two days, but indeed, a little internet research confirmed that this actually IS how butter is made! If you continue whipping plain cream past the hard stage, it will in a matter of seconds fall out into butter and the thin buttermilk you see in the picture.

So we didn't have any whipped cream with our blueberries, but we were extremely pleased with the discovery nonetheless, and decided to incorporate it into the dessert in another way.



Blueberries with cinnamon toast....with homemade butter.

Dinners this week

Pardon the prolonged absence, faithful readers. We've been too busy cooking up a storm to actually... update the blog about our cooking. Here's what we've cooked in the past week:


Monday, 7-6-09: White bean croquettes with mashed purple heirloom potatoes




Tuesday 7-7-09: Fresh fava beans sauteed with thyme and sardine-caper toast




Wednesday 7-8-09: Hake with red chard and couscous


Thursday 7-9-09: Curry of golden beet, red cabbage and adzuki beans




Friday 7-10-09: Garlic scape omelettes with a purslane, arugula, and chickpea salad




Saturday 7-11-09: White bean salad with red quinoa and sauteed field mustard greens




Other miscellaneous cooking: a purslane frittata, a blackcurrant cake (sort of a coffee-cake style recipe, using no leavening), and a green gooseberry crumble. Lots of baked goods lately for all of the sour berries that are in season - we have been using local stone-milled pastry flour from Wild Hive Farm.