Yesterday’s episode of Science Friday on NPR was dedicated to an excellent discussion between Michael Polan, James McWilliams and Brian Halweil about our food system and the pitfalls of being dogmatic about eating local and/or organic. Here’s a link to the free podcast.
Moroccan Preserved Lemons
My wife, Terri mentioned that she missed an Israeli couscous salad that she used to buy from a French deli. She remembered clearly that it contained preserved lemons among other things. I looked them up online and found that I am apparently the last foodie on earth to make my own preserved lemons.
There were slight variations in technique, some adding coriander seeds, cinnamon or a bay leaf and I’m guessing you could use other things to give the lemons a little different flavor. Some prefer Meyer lemons to other varieties. Others think Meyers are too sweet. The lemons I got were not a special variety and were only described at the store as “3 for $1.”
The basics: You need a clean jar with a tight-sealing lid, a bunch of salt (preferably sea salt or kosher salt that won’t give the lemons a chemical taste) and more lemons than you think you can fit in the jar. Cut the nubby ends off of the lemons then slice them lengthwise twice, without cutting all the way through to the end. You want them essentially quartered but still held together at one end. Pour about a quarter inch of salt into the bottom of the jar. Stuff 1-2 tablespoons of salt into the semi-sectioined lemons. Start adding the salt-stuffed lemons to the jar, pressing them down to get the juice releasing until you have a decent layer. Throw a thin layer of salt between layers and any spices you are including. Keep stuffing them in the jar until it is almost filled. Cover with one more layer of salt. Add juice from more lemons if the ones in the jar are not covered in their own juice. Close the jar tightly.
The jar needs to be turned upside down once a day for the first three days to circulate the contents and then every couple of days after that. They cure for 30 days before they are ready to use and at that point they can keep for 6 months to a year. Some say they should be refrigerated after the first 3 days. My two cents—salt is a natural preservative. Lemon juice is a natural preservative. Mixing a preservative with a preservative seems redundant so I’m assuming it’s going to be safe. I’m also assuming the main reason Moroccans would preserve lemons this way is because they didn’t have refrigerators and it’s hot there.
I’m sorry Terri will have to wait a month to get her couscous but I’m excited about how this will turn out. I’ll post an update once I have results of my little experiment.
Mediterranean Barley Salad
My mom went through a vegetarian/macrobiotic phase when I was a teenager. I often joke when it comes up in conversation that “yeah, we ate a lot of barley.” I suspect our barley consumption has grown in my mind based on my memory of a particularly bland batch that caused some conflict at the dinner table. We did eat barley but not all the time and most of the time it was in perfectly fine dishes.
I like barley in soups of course but it makes a great base for a very hearty salad and a cold salad for dinner seemed like a good idea since summer has really hit us here in the Northeast. I’ve been eating it for the last couple of days and it has gotten better the longer it sits in the fridge. Here’s the list of what I put in it:
pearl barley, cooked and cooled (I cooked mine in chicken stock)
cucumbers, peeled and diced
grape tomatoes, halved
olives, kalamata or another strong, dark variety, pitted
mint leaves, chopped
lemon juice
garlic, finely minced
scallions, diced
celery, diced
olive oil
red wine vinegar
black pepper
crumbled feta cheese
crumbled bacon
As with most salads, the amount of each ingredient is based on your own eyes and taste buds. I made a little too much barley and wish I had a few more little cucumbers but it’s a very satisfying even without those improvements.
Cherry Pie
I should definitely learn to make a great pie crust and I’m sure this pie would be even better if I pitted a couple hundred fresh cherries but I’m a lazy baker. I enjoy the peeling, chopping, slicing, boiling, sauteing and straining that goes into making a great dinner. But when it comes to baking, I just haven’t caught the bug. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth so the payoff never seems worth the effort of making everything from scratch. Terri does have a sweet tooth though, so I make the occasional cherry pie.
I try to avoid letting big food corporations cook for me whenever possible but I compromise this rule and just buy pre-made pie crusts from the grocery. I buy two 24 oz. jars of pitted sour cherries in water and sugar rather than the pie filling you can get that has thick syrup. I drain the juice from the cherries into a sauce pan and whisk in a quarter cup of sugar and 3-4 tablespoons of cornstarch. I heat this, stirring constantly until it thickens. I like it to be fairly thick since the cherries will add some liquid as they cook and I prefer pie that stands up when sliced rather pie that is runny. I put the cherries in the bottom crust and dump the sauce over them. I cut the top crust into strips and put it together in a lattice pattern. I brush it with an egg wash and bake it at 400 degrees for about fifty minutes or until the crust is browned.
Maybe I’ll get more excited about baking someday and start making pie from scratch but for now this semi-homemade satisfies Terri’s sweet tooth and only costs me 15-20 minutes to throw together.
Shoe Rack Pantry
Storage is obviously one of the biggest problems in a tiny kitchen. In my kitchen, there are two normal sized, over-the-counter cabinets plus the obligatory, hard to reach cabinets over the stove and fridge. Only one of the cabinets is used for pantry items and I cook a lot so it was getting ridiculous. Good luck finding that bag of black beans or little bottle of sesame oil!
I’m pretty handy and I thought about adding some shelves somewhere on one of the walls but since the kitchen is only five feet wide, they would have to be so shallow they would be almost useless. Plus we are renting and have to consider the consequences of any “remodeling.” I’m guessing we are going to live in this apartment for at least two or three years so if we lost some of the deposit because of something that made our life here better, I wouldn’t hesitate. But a few four inch deep shelves would just be miserable and make an already small kitchen feel even smaller if I could even find shelves that shallow.
I love using things in ways they were not intended and Terri knows this. She suggested a canvas shoe rack, mounted to the wall at the end of the kitchen. I wasn’t sure how well it would work but I trekked out to a local housewares store and found one for $13. Cheap shelves would have cost five times that and nice ones would have been ten times the price. Installation took about ten minutes with some picture hooks, a hammer and a level. There are 24 pockets and it so happens that our feet are about the same size as a bottle of olive oil or a box of pasta. My pantry has some breathing space now and I haven’t even filled every pocket. I’m debating whether to put my most used items or largest items in it since it’s so nice not to have to look behind anything in the shoe rack, unlike my cabinet.
Terri is a genius!
Monkfish Curry
Monkfish is sometimes referred to as “the poor man’s lobster.” It is a really ugly fish but once filleted, the meat is clean and dense. When cooked, it isn’t flaky or steak-like and really does have a texture more like lobster or crab. It’s very good and though I won’t be making it every week after reading about some sustainability issues, it will probably show up in my kitchen again.
Monkfish is ideally cooked in liquid since it cooks fairly slowly and could easily end up overcooked by the time it is done in the center. I saw a lot of tomato-based, Italian dishes online but I wasn’t feeling it. When I thought about cooking with liquid, curry came to mind. I had been on an Indian food strike for a while (no reason, probably just ate too much) but the strike had gone on long enough and this seemed like the perfect way to cook this fish.
Ingredients:
1 Tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. toasted sesame oil
4 cloves garlic, diced
1 yellow onion, chopped in large pieces
3-4 Tbs. prepared curry paste
2 lemongrass stalks, finely chopped
2 Tbs. fresh ginger, diced
2 medium carrots, cut in 1/2 inch sections
2 cans coconut milk
5 small, new potatoes, cut in half or quartered
1 tsp. fish sauce
1/2 tsp. salt (or to taste)
3/4 lb. monkfish filet, cut into 1 inch pieces
Saute the garlic and onion in the olive oil and sesame oil until the onions start to lose their opacity. Add the ginger, lemongrass, carrots and curry paste and continue stirring over medium heat for about two minutes. Add the coconut milk, potatoes, fish sauce and salt and whisk all ingredients together. Simmer on low heat until potatoes begin to soften. Add the fish, cover and simmer another 10-15 minutes until fish cooks through. Serve with rice.
There are a few ingredients that you may have to go to an international market for depending on where you shop. Most groceries have some kind of curry paste available in their asian section. I’d make my own but it would just be for fun since I’ve never had any of the prepared stuff that I consider bad. Lemongrass can be a little hard to find but it adds a lot. The toasted sesame oil is amazing. I’ve had a very small bottle for years. It takes very little of it to change a dish completely since it is so strong. It’s well worth a trip to the store. The fish sauce is the only other ingredient you may have to search for. If you haven’t used it before, be warned. It smells wretched in the bottle. But every dish I’ve ever cooked that calls for it is enhanced by it. You can skip it if you want but you’re missing something.
Swiss Chard vs. Beet Tops
The greens smackdown
Swiss Chard
I had one bunch of swiss chard and one bunch of beet tops in my fridge and decided to cook both since they needed to be used and greens cook down so much that it would be just enough for Terri and I anyway. I considered cooking them together since they are so similar but saw an opportunity for a side by side taste comparison and couldn’t resist.
Beet Tops
The swiss chard is a little prettier since its stems and veins are so red but the beet tops are a very close second in the looks department. I cooked them exactly the same way, sauteing a little diced garlic and diced shallots in olive oil, then adding the greens and half a ladle of chicken stock once they cooked down a little. I salted them—over-salted them actually but they were equally over-salted so I still feel like it was a fair comparison.
In the end Terri had no preference and said they were both good. She may have just been being nice to the cook. My bias was toward the swiss chard since I paid for it and the beet tops come free with the purchase of a bunch of beets. The chard also held its color a little better and I always prefer more aesthetically pleasing foods. I have to say however that the beet tops tasted a little better. The swiss chard had a bitterness that was so slight that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I weren’t comparing it to the beet greens but I have to give the milder beet tops the win in this case. I won’t hesitate to buy swiss chard in the future since you don’t have to by beets to get them but free greens that come as an accessory to the vegetable you are buying that taste as good or better than greens you pay good money for are hard to argue with.
Posted in Greens, Recipes, Vegetables Comments closed
Roasted Beets
I’ve eyed the beets at my Greenmarket the last couple of weeks and finally grabbed a couple bunches. They are pretty only in a Tim Burton way with their dark, dirty flesh, red veined leaves and hairy roots. But unlike most, I’ve always liked beets. I like them from a can just fine. Heated with butter and salt and pepper they are delicious. I like them cut up on a salad. I loved the way they turned blue cheese dressing pink when I’d eat some at a salad bar when I was a kid. I never really liked pickled beets. They’re okay but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and prefer a savory version. My mom made harvard beets—cooked with vinegar, salt, pepper and cornstarch. I’m not a fan (sorry Mom) but I understand why people like the sweet and sour, smooth sauce that is created.
Chile Verde
I had a craving for the chile verde pork I used to get at a restaurant in East Nashville called Rosepepper so I thought I’d try to make some. I’m not a strict follower of recipes and it’s not like the restaurant has it’s recipe online so I was going to have to improvise. In my estimation, the meat was pork shoulder chopped up in fairly small pieces and of course it was in a green/verde sauce that was a bit hot. That’s pretty much all I knew. I looked up chile verde online and found chile verde has many fans but people are extremely opinionated about the dish. Therefore, this disclaimer: I don’t warrantee that my version is authentic to any nation, region, or ethnic cooking method. It bears little resemblance to the dish I’ve eaten in the restaurant but was really good anyway.
From what I could gather the important ingredients are chilies, and tomatillos. The chilies ended up being an issue that particular night. Five different groceries and a twenty block walk yielded a couple of green bell peppers, a few jalapenos and some dried red (ancho?) chilies all of which are not great substitutes for really good green chilies. Substitutions are part of cooking though so I went with what I had.
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