Category Archives: Cooking

Romancing the Rutabaga

Posted on by

smashed rutabagasI read somewhere that while Americans call everyone’s favorite big turnipy-looking root vegetables “rutabagas,” pretty much everyone else in the world calls them “Swedes.” But I also read that the word rutabaga is derived from a Swedish word, so presumably the Swedes don’t call them Swedes, either. I feel like we’ve got sort of a linguistic home field advantage here, guys.

And if etymology is not enough to tempt you into cooking up some rutabagas, then you should know that they are also rich in vitamin C and zinc. So while your co-workers are nursing their dreary colds, you can munch on your rutabaga leftovers, feeling pleasantly superior.

not a good ideaThe question, as always, is how to cook them. You can, of course, cut them up and roast them with some herbs, the tried and true method for root vegetables of all kinds. But because they taste a little like cabbage and because sour cream just seems like the sort of food any respectable Swede would like, I decided to go a different route, which I’ve outlined below. At the very least, I figured it might top Jason’s culinary experiment of the week, which involved post-Halloween candy corn and breakfast cereal. I’ll leave you to be the judge.

Smashed Sour Cream and Onion Rutabagas Continue reading →

Thinking Outside the Stalk: Salt and Vinegar Broccoli

Posted on by

broccoli sandwichMost people, when faced with a head of broccoli, will hack it up and throw it in a pan, sautéing it or steaming it and doing very little else to it. Nothing wrong with that; I have eaten broccoli in exactly this manner hundreds, maybe thousands of times and been perfectly happy. But there’s also nothing wrong with giving your broccoli the royal treatment every once in a while.

I find it hard to think of anything more royal than a good salt and vinegar potato chip. What’s more, dear reader, is that potato is not the only vegetable to take kindly to these flavors. Broccoli, with its cabbage-y overtones, is an ideal candidate. I actually first learned this at No. 7 in Brooklyn, when I tried their trademark double-decker broccoli tacos. They take a hard taco shell and a soft one, paste them together with black bean hummus, fill them with finely chopped broccoli treated with shallot vinegar and top the whole thing with feta cheese. Holy-brocc-oly! It was better than a salt and vinegar potato chip, and that, I recognize, is a bold statement.

You can certainly try to replicate those tacos, but once you have a mess of salt and vinegar broccoli, why stop there? Use it on a sandwich with ricotta cheese and fresh tomatoes. Scoop it on top of a baked potato with some cheddar cheese. Mix it with some hot sauce and use it as a garnish for a quesadilla or burrito. I did all of these things with great results, but I surely did not exhaust all of the possibilities. Seize the broccoli, seize the day and come up with your uses.

Salt and Vinegar Broccoli Continue reading →

I’ll See Your Pesto and Raise You an Arugula

Posted on by

ASA pesto Every garden, every growing season, has its bumper crops, those wildly successful experiments that you can’t anticipate ahead of time. (Just ask my mother, who has been frantically cooking, freezing and foisting tomatoes upon anyone who comes near her. Actually, maybe you shouldn’t ask her, or even get near her, unless you’re prepared to make gazpacho.) In our household, it’s arugula that keeps growing and growing, almost faster than we can use it. So, to the rescue, comes one of our favorite new easy dinners: arugula pesto.

A delicious pesto is not the territory of basil alone. It’s true that you could substitute arugula for basil in the most familiar of pesto recipes (pine nuts, garlic, parmesan), but why stop there? In fact, pesto means paste, so you should feel free add any manner of deliciousness, blend it to a paste and call it pesto. I’ve come up with a couple of variations to get you started.

A quick word on measurements: one of the real pleasures of pesto is that you just keep dropping things into the food processor until you taste it and become convinced that you are a culinary genius. Far be it from me to rob you of that magical experience. So I’ll give you some very general guidelines for enough pesto for two big portions of pasta, but really, the best thing to do is to taste it frequently throughout until you feel like eating big gobs of it with a spoon. Then you’re done.

A.S.A Pesto (Arugula, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Asiago) Continue reading →

You’re a Star, Green Bean: Loubieh B’Zeit

Posted on by

loubieh2Eggplant has eggplant parmesan. Spinach has spanakopita. Even the humble cabbage has cabbage rolls. But green beans too often get cast in only a supporting  role, shuffled off into perpetual side dish territory. And that’s too bad, since beautiful green beans are pouring in these days, from both our CSA and our own garden.

Luckily, there’s a delicious Lebanese dish that gives green beans their moment in the spotlight. It’s called loubieh b’zeit, and you can find many, many versions of it (and almost as many different spellings) on the ol’ Internet.  I used some combination of them to come up with my own. Most recipes call for Lebanese Seven Spice, but if that seems way too exotic for your neighborhood grocery, you can make a pretty good simulacrum from spices that are probably already in your cupboard: equal parts black pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, allspice and coriander, all ground up together. (I think the real thing has fenugreek, but this will get you pretty close.)

Another great thing about this dish is that it’s often served cold or room temperature as a mezze, which means it’s practically begging to be a leftover. Stuff some the next day in a pita with some tzatziki sauce and you’ve got yourself a mean sandwich. And you know how I feel about sandwiches.

Loubieh B’Zeit Continue reading →

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kohlrabi?

Posted on by
kohlrabi

It kind of resembles a Muppet, which is another reason to like it.

I hope that when you read that title, you sang it in full-lunged Sound of Music style. But if you Google “kohlrabi” and see the articles that pop up, you may be convinced that this vegetable is even more trouble than a certain spirited chanteuse/nun. No one quite seems to know what to do with the rather starchy, fibrous outcast cousin of the cabbage family.  Should you cut it up and dress it like a salad? Grate it and fry it into fritters? Steam it and puree it into some kind of vichyssoise-like soup?

I am typically too lazy to blend or fry much of anything, so when a couple kohlrabi landed in our CSA haul, I went looking for a different solution. Amidst the online kohlrabi hand-wringing, I found a few sites that mentioned that it’s often used in Indian cooking and pairs well with Indian spices. This struck me as odd, since I have never seen kohlrabi on the menu of any Indian restaurant, nor did I confront it during my very brief visit to India. But maybe the Indian restaurateurs are hiding this delicacy from Western customers, certain that their palates can never fully appreciate the full magic of the kohlrabi. Anyway, it was worth a shot.

curried kohlrabiSo I made up the following kohlrabi recipe, and I have to say that kohlrabi does pair well with Indian spices. I used half pav bhaji masala and half chaat masala, but use whatever mix you can get your hands on, and it will probably turn out just fine. And don’t worry, all you kohlrabi purists out there: the spiciness does not cover up the essential cabbagey complexity. Problem solved.

Curried Kohlrabi and Lentils Continue reading →

Rainy Day Cauliflower and Potatoes

Posted on by

cauliflower and potatoesIt’s been a gray and cool spring around these parts, but there’s no reason that a little chill in the air needs to rain on your culinary parade. After all, the days are surely numbered until it’s so hot that you’d rather, I don’t know, be chained down and forced to watch that terrible new Cameron Crowe movie instead of turning on your oven. So embrace the cool; make a casserole.

Here’s one I came up with this weekend. Full disclosure: I wanted to make something that necessitated that I slice at least one ingredient because my friend Mignon gave me a sweeeet new mandolin for my birthday. This handy tool makes me feel at least fifty-three percent fancier as I am cooking, and my potato slices really were shockingly even. But even if you don’t have a mandolin (or a Mignon) in your life, fear not: you can totally rock it old-school and slice them by hand.

Rainy Day Cauliflower and Potatoes Continue reading →

Polenta: The Answer to Starch Fatigue

Posted on by

mushroom polentaOne of the first lessons that any new cook learns is that you can cook pretty much anything and put it on rice and it tastes okay. Ditto with pasta. Hell, you can even use a piece of toast if you’re in a pinch.

But what to do when these old standbys start tasting a little tired? Here’s what: polenta. It’s a thick, savory corn porridge, and the exact same rice-or-pasta rules apply. If I have some roasted root vegetables rapidly approaching their life expectancy in the fridge, I heat them up in a skillet and throw them on top of polenta and it’s a whole new meal. If I have some chunky tomato-y thing that I originally made for pasta, it’s bound to taste great on top of polenta with some Parmesan cheese.

And polenta isn’t just for leftovers. Here’s a yummy mushroom number that I dreamed up in a hurry last night.

Polenta with Mushrooms and Goat Cheese Continue reading →

Earliest Spring Vegetables: Let’s Get Excited

Posted on by

The first day of spring brought a few inches of snow to the Big Apple, and the real apples at the farmer’s market this weekend were looking a little tired. But take heart, ye well-wintered and weary-hearted: yesterday I noticed the first new buds on a tree. Spring is coming. Taking its own sweet time to get here, maybe, but it’s coming. So in celebration, let’s take a look at the first few superstar vegetables that should be hitting your local markets any day now, along with some ideas about how to use them. Those with green thumbs should also think about getting these same plants in the ground as soon as you think you’ve weathered the last frost. (And to inspire you gardeners, I’m using images from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, a favorite of ours, as well as one from Everwilde Farms.)

hudson arugula Arugula: Honestly, it took me a while to warm to arugula. It still seems to me an adult taste, like sitting through an opera or reading a Henry James novel. But warm to it I did, and at no time is it better than in the early spring, when the leaves taste perky rather than too bitter or spicy. Try them in a salad with a nice mustardy dressing (olive oil, mustard, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper), or use them in a sandwich to give it a little more kick than regular lettuce.

everwilde rhubarbRhubarb: I’m not sure I realized that you could make something with rhubarb and without strawberries until I was fully grown. But particularly if you like sour tastes like citrus (and I do), rhubarb is a natural choice. Stew it with some sugar and a little water, and you’ve got one heck of a topping for pancakes. And yes, strawberries or any other kind of berries you can get your hands on are great thrown in, as well. Continue reading →

A Cauldron of Southwestern Black Bean & Mustard Squash Soup

Posted on by

I’ve been into beans this winter.  I like pouring something that could substitute for buckshot into a cauldron of water and ending up with soft, succulent morsels of food.  And I cannot overemphasize the appeal of the cauldron component; to make yummy beans from scratch, I have to take the biggest pot we have, a cast-iron thing of uncertain origin in the home, and fill it with all sorts of whatever’s-on-hand to make delicious what would otherwise be bland bean flesh.  I mean, eye of newt is surely not tasty to most palettes and Macbeth’s witches weren’t making dinner, so this is perhaps not the best comparison, but I like pouring and scraping and shaking whatever cool things I can find into a simmering pot and getting a little magic out of it when all is said and done.

Looking at this picture, I remember that we sprinkled some cheese on top, too.

Looking at this picture, I remember that we sprinkled some cheese on top, too.

So the other day I decided to riff on the rough idea of a Southwestern-themed bean soup I had burbling around in my brain.  We had a butternut squash on hand, not Shannon’s favorite vegetable, and I’m always trying to come up with ways to make yummy things folks don’t typically like.  Note that you don’t have to include all of these ingredients in your version.  You shouldn’t make a special trip to the store just for a lime or whatever, and the soup will be tasty even if you don’t get the mustard going.

Southwestern Black Bean & Mustard Squash Soup Continue reading →

Where Did I Put My Farro Salad Knick Knacks?: A Blue Apron Experiment

Posted on by

chilaquilesIf you’ve never heard of Blue Apron, you have either been living under a rock or you like cooking so much that it has never occurred to you to outsource your grocery shopping and meal planning to someone else. I was one (or possibly the other) until very recently, when my friend Monisha (note: she is infinitely hipper than me) hooked me up with a free trial. Here’s the way it works: subscribers get a weekly box of ingredients that they use to follow three prescribed recipes for two-person dinners. (There’s also a family plan that is for four people, two or four times per week.) And when I say they send you the ingredients, I mean ALL the ingredients, right down to itty-bitty bags of pre-measured spices and toppings that they label “knick knacks.”

knick knacksThe week of my free test run I chose the vegetarian box (obvs), which happened to be farro and sumac-roasted sweet potato salad, poblano chilaquiles topped with avocado and an egg, and roasted butternut squash with stewed white beans and gremolata. (I know, right? If you don’t have to look any of those words up, hats off to you.) I will admit that, in advance of the box’s arrival, I was a wee bit skeptical, mostly because it is in my nature to be skeptical.

But I am here to inform you that it was actually kind of awesome. First, there’s the oooh-and-ahhh Christmas present feel of opening a big box of interesting stuff. Second, it made me consider cooking recipes that were outside my typical repertoire. Third, there is a mindless pleasure in following a set of beautifully written directions, and Blue Apron must know this, because the recipe cards are like the supermodels of the recipe card population. Continue reading →