Category Archives: Cooking

A Pepper Reeducation

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blackbeansliders

Black bean sliders with chipotle mayo and all the fixins? Yes, please!

A confession, dear readers: I was recently brought face-to-face with my own alarming level of pepper ignorance. I don’t talk about it in mixed company, of course, and I try to give all peppers the respect they deserve, but I do harbor some latent anti-bell-pepper feelings. But that isn’t the half of it. A couple days ago, I realized that I didn’t know one of my pepper darlings (a model minority pepper, if you will) half as well as I thought I did.

And before you get all high and mighty, take this little test. Is the following statement true or false: the chipotle pepper is a variety of pepper (just like bell peppers, banana peppers, Thai chili peppers, etc.) If you said true, you are WRONG, my friend, as wrong as I was. Chipotle peppers are actually a preparation of pepper, not a varietal. They are jalapeño peppers that have been dried and smoked. I know! Crazy! Our little pal the jalapeño has been going incognito! And he’s been smoking his way into chipotle-dom ever since the reign of the Aztecs.

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the mega-successful fast food chain, which is probably the reason most of us learned the word “chipotle” in the first place. I became acquainted with my first massive Chipotle burrito as an undergraduate, and if there is a time in your life when it seems like eating your weight in guacamole might just solve all your problems, then that is it.

chipotlemeco

Meco chipotles

But it wasn’t too long after that when I met the real chipotle and started buying the little cans of chipotles packed in adobo sauce (a marinade of tomatoes, vinegar, spices, etc). These are the easiest ones to score in America; they’re almost certainly in the canned food aisle of your local grocery store. It’s typically the smaller morita kind of chipotles that you find packed into the cans, rather than the larger, smokier, pricier, and more-coveted meco kind. But let’s be honest: meco chipotles look like cigar butts, and I probably wouldn’t quite know what to do with one even if I could find it easily. The canned kind, on the other hand, are super easy to use, and so, so good. If you haven’t yet tried them, here are three terrifically easy ways you can add the smoky kick of the chipotle to your own cooking. Continue reading →

Jalapeño-Rosemary Lemon Chard Baked Potatoes

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IMG_1533Baked potatoes are the bomb.  Rub the potatoes down with oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and stick ‘em in the over, and I am happy.  And that’s why, at a job where food not eaten by students is inexplicably dumped in the trash, I advised the chef to give the leftovers to me, rather than the garbage.  And so I ended up with a huge Ziploc freezer back full of baked potatoes.

Which was fine because I had too much work to do last night to try to figure out some way to make that CSA squash palatable to Shannon, who ranks squash somewhere along the lines of gruel.  Still, we had a bunch of new CSA greens, too.  What to do?

Jalapeño-Rosemary Lemon Chard Baked Potatoes, that’s what to do.  Shannon was skeptical of the flavor profile, but part of my job is to propose ideas and suggestions Shannon is skeptical of and then overcome the odds.  It took about forty-five minutes to make (mostly due to washing and chopping everything), a time frame that would probably have been shorter if I wasn’t listening to All Things Considered and just kind of unwinding, and the end result was a brightly flavorful and filling dinner with a little bit of heat and a fresh, slightly crunchy aspect to the expected earthiness of the potato.  It was kind of a nice new take on the stolid tuber.

Jalapeño-Rosemary Lemon Chard Baked Potatoes

  • 1 large green jalapeño, finely chopped, with 7 or 8 of the seeds retained
  • 5 sprigs rosemary, leaves finely chopped
  • 1 bunch of Swiss chard, leaved separated from stalk and roughly chopped and stalk cut into ¼ pieces Continue reading →

Snow Cap Bean Soup with Veggie Sausage Meatballs

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snow cap soupThis past weekend, I was talking to a woman who made her own cactus fruit juice. Where, I queried, did she procure cactus fruits? “Oh, you know,” she said. “Down the block.”

This is one of those New York things that I love: the weird ingredients you find whether you’re looking for them or not. Years ago, as an impoverished new owner of an MFA degree, I was introduced to the East Village Cheese Shop (3rd Ave between 9th and 10th), a wonderland of steeply discounted cheese, obviously, but also all sorts of other oddities. On a recent trip there, I found these beautiful Community Grains Snow Cap heirloom beans, and if the price tag did not convince me to pick them up ($1.50 for a whole pound!!), then the description on the package certainly did: “Known for their jaunty white caps, smooth texture, and surprisingly potato-like flavor.” Jaunty white caps?! Sold!

jaunty white capsOf course, I’m often guilty of, say, buying something because of the eloquent description on the label and then not knowing what to do with it. So I made up this easy soup recipe for my beans, hearty and good for curing you of this new chilly nip in the air. Sure, you could substitute white beans, but why not scour your supermarket for something you haven’t used before, something…jaunty, perhaps?

Snow Cap Bean Soup with Veggie Sausage Meatballs Continue reading →

It’s All About the Dressings: Quick and Dirty Quinoa Tabbouleh

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IMG_1415Quinoa is hip.  My supermarket, which is far from a healthfood store or anything particularly familiar to, say, a suburban shopper, now has at least four brands of it, all organic.  Hidden away is a Goya version for a third of the cost.

I’ve taken to making like a cup of the stuff at some point in the week (add a bouillon cube to the water to offset that metallic’y taste it sometimes gets) and using it as a salad or taco ingredient.  It should keep for the better part of the week in an air-tight container in the fridge.   The other night, used it to make a badass tabbouleh variant that took about fifteen minutes to prepare and was super filling.

  • Chop one bunch of parsley, including the more supple portions of some of the stems.
  • Mix it in a bowl with half-a-cup of the quinoa.
  • Add two teaspoons of capers.
  • Make a dressing of the juice from 2 lemons, olive oil to taste, a tablespoon of the caper brine, a shake of garlic powder, some fresh ground pepper, and a dash of chili powder.
  • Mix and eat

Paired with a slice of quality bread and some slices of tomato and cheese, this made an awesome meal that didn’t take, as is so often the case with me, half an evening to prepare.

What Was On Hand No. 136: Slaw Dressing On the Shoulders of Mission Chinese

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Pretty, but kinda wonky.

Pretty, but kinda wonky.

As part of my buddy Tancil’s birthday evening a while back, I ended up in Cobble Hill at Mission Chinese Food.  Mission Chinese used to live in the East Village, makes pretty much the best Chinese food I’ve ever had if you consider Chinese a cuisine that uses Chinese food as a launch pad into Chinese’ish awesomeness, and recently took up residence in Brooklyn after some kind of kerfuffle with rent in Manhattan.  These factors apparently combined to make The Times take notice and dedicate the “Eat” section of the Sunday Magazine to the place, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in my twelve or so years of subscribing to the Sunday Times.

So I went ahead and riffed on their recipe for Cabbage Salad with Sesame-Anchovy Dressing, which was okay except for the fact that I ended up ignoring the recipe’s measurements because I don’t know why and also substituting green-olive hummus or something like that for tahini because that’s what I had on-hand.  The results were pretty but mixed.

The next night, the fridge still full of unused cabbage and other CSA veggies looking for a fate, I combined the remaining “traditional” and red cabbages, spring onion greens, peeler- Continue reading →

Summer Garden Kasha Salad & Blackened String Beans Whatever-Style

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IMG_1375The garden is kicking it thanks to the soaker hose-timer one-two, and we ended up with a bunch of monster-mature string beans.  The things double in heft overnight.  So, what to do?  These guys weren’t up to a gentle steaming.

Blacken.

And pair them with all the tomatoes bulking up in the garden, too.

First, the ‘maters, starring in an ensemble cast in Summer Garden Kasha Salad.

Combine in a big bowl:

Purty

Purty

  • One cup cold kasha (Kasha is buckwheat; barley would work as well.  Cook it with apat of butter in the pot, then chill in the fridge.)
  • One cucumber cut into small chunks
  • One bunch of parsley, chopped, with heaviest stems removed (We used broad leaf and, uhh, traditional? parsley.  I completely forgot that the former existed until the CSA dropped a potter version on us.)
  • One sweet red pepper, diced
  • Two monster or four medium tomatoes, chopped (We had Black Krim and Woodle Orange varieties.)
  • As much feta cheese as you can get your hands on (Bulgarian Sheep Feta is the Holy Grail.)

For the dressing, squeeze, shake, grind, etc into the bowl: Continue reading →

Are These Zucchini Multiplying While I’m Not Watching?

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zucchiniI love zucchini. Really. But this is the time of year when zucchini seems less like a vegetable and more like a species of highly reproductive rodent. Every time I think I have a handle on our zucchini supply, the CSA bombs me with another shipment. Last week, a stranger physically dragged Jason into a church up the street so she could foist a bag of zucchini upon him.

And I know I’m not alone. I know this because when I was in Ohio recently, my mom, while feeding us zucchini bread for breakfast, suggested that perhaps we’d like some nice stuffed zucchini for lunch. Or maybe we had a little extra zucchini room in our suitcases? When I asked her what was up, she sighed and said, “I keep telling your father to pick them when they’re smaller.” Enter Farmer Dwight, right on cue, carrying a zucchini the size of a surface-to-air missile and grinning mischievously.

So I’m going to share one of my go-to zucchini recipes. It’s adapted from one I found years ago in one of the Moosewood cookbooks. (One of these days, I will pay proper homage to Mollie Katzen and all things Moosewood, but right now I have to keep an eye on my zucchini, lest they try to mate again.) It’s delicious, a little unusual and good for using up zucchini. Who could ask for more?

Zucchini Ankara Continue reading →

Quick Dinner Sandwiches: Torta Riffage and Beauteous Red Onions

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This is onion overkill. I had to remove probably two-thirds of these to get the taste proportions correct.

This is onion overkill. I had to remove probably two-thirds of these to get the taste proportions correct.

I love immigrants.  I’m convinced that if anything is to save the U.S. from its tech-tweaked obliviousness and proudly-uninformed politics, it will be immigrants coming here to kick ass and remind the rest of us how it is done.  There are two primary personal experiences that actualize this feeling of love.  The first is the rare experience of taking a cab (always driven by an immigrant) and leaving soothed by the reminder that people all over the world still see this as the place to come and work your ass of in relative peace and safety.  The second is the torta.

The torta is the ultimate combination of Mexican gastronomic glory and that ultimate form in American dining: the sandwich.  Its bread is white-bread hero rolls, and I don’t even care.  We eat beans a lot in our house because 1) they’re super tasty, 2) they’re super inexpensive, and 3) they’re super inexpensive, and after paging through cookbooks looking for something out of the ordinary to make for dinner and getting distracted by a recipe for marinating onions, I decided to riff on the torta motif with those onions as the primary ingredient. Continue reading →

Pimp My Potluck: Spicy Southwestern Potato Salad

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southwestern potato salad

Also makes a great side dish for a night at home, with leftovers for the next day’s lunch.

One of the beautiful things about New York City in the summer is that the abundant sunshine drives people out of the tiny, winter hovels they call home and forces them to interact with the outside world. Hence, the plethora of outdoor concerts and events, to say nothing of the potluck, picnic and barbecue invitations that begin to pop up in one’s inbox.

But what exactly to contribute to these events can be a sticky problem. Beer is almost always welcome, but what if you need something edible in concert with the potable? Forget about baking whatever you took to those holiday parties months ago; turning the dial on the oven is a dangerous proposition that could result in instant HIC (Heat-Induced Coma). Salad is often a good idea, but no one like the sight of something brown and wilted giving up the ghost in the middle of the table. I think that’s how potato salad became a potluck staple, but I tire of both the mayonnaise-y and vinegary varieties pretty rapidly. Here’s a variation that has a refreshing citrus kick but is still hearty enough to carry you through the most taxing games of cornhole.

Spicy Southwestern Potato Salad

Dressing:

  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • Juice of one lime
  • 2 tablespoons of your favorite hot sauce
  • Salt and pepper to taste Continue reading →

Tamarind Time Machine

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tamarind tofu

I didn’t even have to squeeze anything out of a sock this time!

A lot of the time, my days in Cambodia feel very far away. Going through my old notebooks is like walking into a weird time portal, full of interviews with people I don’t remember (“Question: how long does it take you to paint a single tuk-tuk?”), odd to-do lists (“Find copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for Savuth”) and discarded lyrics for a comedic folk song entitled “All My Linga Wants Is Your Yoni” (funnier than it sounds, I swear).

But with the publication of this cool anthology, which includes some of my Cambodian musings, I was looking for a way to pay homage to and feel reconnected with the Kingdom of Wonder. That’s when I went hunting through my notes for the recipe for Tofu with Tamarind, Chili and Basil. I scored it while writing a weekly column for The Phnom Penh Post called The Learning Curve in which I would try to learn traditional Khmer pursuits and then make fun of myself while I bumbled my way through them. Looking back, I see that I must have irritated a lot of busy people while researching this column, but they tended to be unfailingly good-natured about it, and Oeurm Pav at Arun Restaurant was no exception.

But would I be able to remember enough about interviewing her to recreate my favorite Khmer dish? It was a long time ago, my notes were sketchy, and even in optimal conditions, I’m lazy about measurements. However, I was able to purchase tamarind paste in an Indian grocery store in Queens, whereas in Cambodia, I had to boil the tamarind and squeeze it through one of Jason’s socks for lack of a cheesecloth. Perhaps giving undue weight to this head start, I decided that I could just intuit my way through the rest of it. Continue reading →