So, before going home, I actually made a weekend stopover in Portland, Oregon, both to visit a friend and to check out the restaurant/farm/local food scene I have been hearing so much about for the last couple of years. The city — filled with microbreweries and food co-ops — did not disappoint, and the farmers’ market was particularly stunning. Not even one of the biggest markets in Portland, and not even up to full steam yet as we just finally get into warmer months, the market still offered an abundance of riches not to be found even at the Union Square market in New York. Exhibit A: the giant pile of beautiful carrots you see above (and that we bought a bunch of to take with us as a snack on our glorious hike).
As good as the restaurants are, with produce like this, I had to cook at least one meal. We just picked what looked best (jewel-like beets, incredibly tender lettuce) as the starting point of our meal, and then used the co-op and Trader Joe’s (no shame!) to fill out the rest of the meal. And so our meal: Red Lentils with Cayenne, Cranberries and Toasted Walnuts; Wilted Beet Greens; Roasted Beets; and Simple Green Salad (not pictured, no recipe). We crumbled goat cheese over the whole thing; I would suggest adding goat cheese to any of these recipes if you make them individually.
I promised yesterday that I would post about the green beans in the picture below. So here it is:
This is a technique that works with pretty much any green vegetable, but is especially good with green beans and their cousins and any kind of leafy green: Boil some water, enough to add the veggie to with out overflowing the pot. Add in the veggies for a little bit, until their color darkens and they soften a little bit. This is really short (~15 seconds) for things like spinach, a bit longer (45 secs to a minute) for green beans, and even longer for a tough fucker like kale. Take the vegetables out and run them under clod water. Some recipes will tell you to plunge them into ice water. I think this is overkill.
Any scruffy young bachelor who can’t make scrambled eggs deserves a few good slaps about the head with a rubber spatula. They don’t have to be GOOD scrambled eggs, but everyone should be able to throw beaten eggs into a pan with a little hot fat and stir them until they’re cooked through. Scrambled eggs are my fallback meal, and served up with a vegetable, it’s actually one of my favorite dinners.
But sometimes plain scrambled eggs get a little boring. They need a little spice. Maybe an awesome Spanish spice that makes them taste like bacon? Yeah, that’ll do…
Apologies, apologies, readers. I fully intended to post about how to make mayonnaise today, to follow up Phil’s post from yesterday. Unfortunately, I’m at home in Berkeley, and our family’s computer is almost 10 years old, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to upload the photos. And I have been trying for half an hour. And it is incredibly sunny outside.
So, even though I made a delicious meyer lemon aioli last night, you may have to wait til next week for the recipe (because we all know everything is better with photos, right?). In the meantime, I have a post coming about my trip to Portland (where I was this past weekend), with photos already uploaded, that I’ll put up in the next day or two.
And in the immediate meantime, a really good op-ed by Dan Barber, the chef at Blue Hill in New York and Blue Hill at Stone Barns upstate. This is the best piece I’ve read about how the rising prices of food may in fact have a really positive effect on the way Americans view our food industry, along with some proactive suggestions. Read here.
1) Monday: Mosaic of Foie Gras and Black Angus Beef Cheek, Satur Farms Beets, Wagyu Carpaccio, Peppercress, HORSERADISH
2) Tuesday: Duo of Abalone: Slow Baked with Paprika, Cauliflower Purée, Tempura with Early Mesclun, Ibérico Ham, HORSERADISH
3) Wednesday: Poached Atlantic Halibut with Saffron-Mussel Velouté, Fava Bean Fricassée, Sweet Bell Peppers, Wild Rice, HORSERADISH
4) Thursday: Trio of …. Alright! I admit it! You see right through me. Lies! All lies! The insecurity is killing me though.
The truth is it’s been a whole lot of pasta and tomato sauce lately, nothing too interesting. I’m ashamed.
… but wait a minute. Nothing too interesting? Nothing too interesting! Wash my mouth out with soap and beet salad.
Pasta and tomato sauce remains the unsung hero of the bachelor kitchen. We take its domination of the singles cooking scene for granted. When Lebron James scores a billion points, dunks on a stable of 7-foot Eastern Europeans while flashing his pearly white smile (and does it night after night) do we say “nothing too interesting?”
I raved a little while ago about how much I like making soup, and I included a recipe for a simple artichoke soup.
This soup is still simple, but it comes from the opposite end of the spectrum. Basically it’s just a really hearty soup made from what I happened to have lying around the house. The soup contains:
1. Onions, garlic, and carrots - sauteed in olive oil before adding the
2. Chicken stock - could easily be veggie. I boiled this and then added
3. Pasta - a great way to make soup feel more like a meal. I used little O-shaped ones, but any bite-size pasta is good. Spaghetti, not so much. You can also use any kind of grain such as rice, barley, quinoa, etc. Time the cooking accordingly.
4. Kale - a really healthy green, but a tough one. Boiling makes it a lot more manageable.
5. Egg - stirred in at the last minute, egg adds a little more substance. Feel free to omit.
This is probably the last soup of the season, as it’s already getting hot, but I wanted to throw it up here to demonstrate how to make a quick meal by just boiling some stuff. The above stuff is just meant to serve as an example. You are the decider: Feel free to choose your own stuff.
This is an original Food Junta recipe, with no inspiration from anywhere other than my own imagination. Carbonara is typically pasta — usually spaghetti — with eggs, cheese, pork, and black pepper. You add the raw eggs directly to the pasta after it’s done cooking, and the heat of the pasta cooks the egg and makes it into a kind of sauce (though most recipes have you throw the whole thing into a skillet for a minute, just to be safe).
Mine is not technically a carbonara, nor is it even really following the exact method of making a carbonara. I just add the eggs on in here, and use the whole egg, not just the egg yolk, because what am I really going to do with a bunch of extra egg whites? But it is in the spirit of a carbonara, and the idea of a carbonara is what made me think of my last minute innovation to add the eggs (because I already had pasta, bacon, cheese, and black pepper…I felt like something was missing, and there was only one thing that could be). Continue Reading »
The fourth annual D’Artagnan Duckathon, which took place at Chelsea Market (in nyc) yesterday, is covered in a great slideshow by Gourmet. I particularly like the challenge that involves matching a table full of testicles to the animals that they came from (slides 7 and 8). I bet if Nikki had to do that challenge, instead of just cooking her ridiculous “lovely” this and “sexy” that, she would finally have to pack her knives and go.
You really know it’s spring in New York when you see the foodies elbowing one another at the farmer’s markets to grab up bunches of that elusive and highly seasonal harbinger of spring - ramps.
Ramps are a member of the allium family (onion, garlic, etc.) and are also known as wild leeks. How are they different from regular leeks? They’re awesome. That’s how.
Tasting like a mix between garlic and onion, ramps are great in a number of dishes, many of which involve bacon fat. It’s tough to find ramp recipes in cookbooks as they only grow on the east coast and as they’re so infrequently available, but a quick google search will put you on the right track. But I find it hard to believe you can find anything better than the spaghetti with ramp pesto that I made last weekend. But get to the market soon. These guys won’t be around much longer. And I’ll be there, ready to elbow you for that last bunch.
But, I have two more dishes I just must write about, and who knows, maybe they’ll be helpful, if only for your leftovers. One is the very delicious and very obvious/easy matzoh pizza. One is the less delicious, completely unobvious, and definitely avoidable matzoh meal pasta that I made Saturday night when I was feeling both sorry for myself and in need of carbohydrate.
Let’s start with the good, before we get to the bad (not to mention ugly):
Will the transliteration confusion never stop? No, it won’t, and apparently Passover will never end. This morning, tired of plain matzoh grabbed on the run to work, I took the time to make a matzoh-centric brunch of matzoh brei, southwestern style, by which I mean served with avocado and salsa. This is a really easy recipe, either to get you through Passover, to use up leftover matzoh after Passover, or just as an actually really yummy breakfast.
Matzoh brei is a take on French toast, basically. Instead of soaking stale bread in milk and egg and frying it, you soak matzoh (stale tasting enough on its own) in water or egg and fry it. But I’ve never really liked French toast, honestly, and I’ve also never been that into the typical sweet matzoh brei, served with maple syrup. Reading a recipe for savory matzoh brei a few years ago was like a revelation for me, and I love love love the results. Continue Reading »
[Editor's note - I've been on a bit of hiatus, but I return to glory with this quick recipe. More soon.]
This is a somewhat austere example of what I was discussing a few weeks ago about a meal not needing to be a Meal.
Simply take a cooked beet, slice, and drizzle with olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Good over salad greens and with goat cheese, but it certainly doesn’t need to be embellished. Also makes a good antipasto.
Now I know you’re all asking yourselves the same question: Where does one get a cooked beet? Well, one thinks ahead a little bit. Continue Reading »
Another dinner party, another roast chicken. I don’t actually have that much more to say about this one, amazingly, other than that the original recipe comes from the magazine Real Simple, which the middle-aged woman in me just adores. Try the chicken (which literally takes 10 minutes or less of active time to produce true magnificence) and you’ll see why. Continue Reading »
Happy Passover, everybody! So, we once again celebrate the Jews’ continued survival with a week of not eating leavened products. For the way most people — and food magazines and newspaper columns — go on, you’d think this was a greater hardship than the Jews’ slavery in Egypt and subsequent 40 years of wandering through the desert. It’s only eight days long, guys. It’s like the Atkins diet, for a week. Plus, you get matzoh!
Glorious, glorious matzoh. I have to say, I really like the stuff, however you choose to spell it. I really only eat it during Passover, though I suppose it could very well be eaten year round. And since I started making this recipe last year, matzoh has only gotten more appealing to me. Nothing else would work as well in this recipe; the matzoh’s crisp texture and general lack of flavor make the perfect base for the toffee and chocolate topping. Last year, I used this recipe, from Marcy Goldman in A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking, called “My Trademark, Most Requested, Absolutely Magnificent Caramel Matzoh Crunch.” And, surprisingly, it actually lived up to that title!
This year, when I was googling for the recipe again, I stumbled upon the pastry chef and cookbook writer David Lebovitz’s recipe for matzoh crunch, which is actually his adaptation of Goldman’s original recipe. Won over by the mouthwatering photos, I decided to give his (very similar) take a try. He really looks at them like they are pieces of candy, not a substitute for a real dessert but a pleasure in themselves. I liked his idea to add vanilla to the caramel, but what I really loved was his suggestion to sprinkle salt over the top of the chocolate. There is nothing better, to my mind, than the sweet/salty combo, and the addition of salt to these beauties nails it perfectly. Continue Reading »
So, remember my last-minute dinner party, that featured paprika-cayenne roast chicken? Back when I was just planning on bringing something to someone else’s dinner party, I had big plans for this pie — strawberry-rhubarb, just when rhubarb was coming into stores. I have been meaning to post about it since then, but I wanted to make it an extra-special post…a slideshow!
This is not a slideshow about making pie, exactly. It’s much more a slideshow about making pie crust, which seems to have attained mythical stature among even the most talented and ambitious cooks I know. Most people, after baking long enough, have one recipe for pie crust that is their go-to pie crust recipe, with just the right amount of flakiness and flavor. I don’t (though I would welcome suggestions, commenters). I actually think, unless the recipe really screws you, that the success of a pie crust depends a lot more on technique and, therefore, on practice. Here are a few really important things to keep in mind when making a pie crust:
1. You should use a mix of fats — both shortening (Crisco or lard, I use Crisco) and butter. Butter will give flavor, shortening makes things lighter and flakier.
2. The fats need to be cold. Keep them in the fridge just until you are going to use them.
3. You can use a food processor to make the dough, but at least the first couple times I really think you should use your hands. You will get greasy. You will also get a good feel for what the texture of the dough needs to be.
4. Be careful when adding the ice water (and make sure it is ice water). Throw a few tablespoons in at first, but then add tablespoon by tablespoon.
5. Don’t cheat on chilling in the fridge, but don’t overdo it either. Rolling dough out still kind of flummoxes me, so I can’t really hold forth on that. I mean, come on, I’m using a wine bottle.
Here, in its full clickable glory, the pie crust slideshow (full recipe for pie crust and filling, and better explanation of technique, after the jump):
