Vegetable – The Constables Larder

Summer Meals: Bean Salad, Tenderloin Marinade and Salad Dressing

It is so nice to have grilling season back upon us. In many cases, our jobs as cooks is to get out of the way and let the food and fresh product do the talking. Here are notes from Saturday’s dinner, when we had a few guests over for Lisl’s birthday.

Three Bean Salad

1 can of red kidney beans
1 can of garbonzo beans (chickpeas)
1 can of black beans
4 ears of corn
4 sweet peppers (multiple colors if possible), cut into bite sized pieces
1 red onion, diced
1 bunch of spring onion, diced
Large bunch of cherry tomatoes, halved
1 jalapeno pepper, minced
Large bunch of cilantro, washed well and chopped
limes
lemon
salt and pepper
olive oil
champagne vinegar

I make this salad slightly different every time, but my basic routine is the following. Carefully wash the canned beans in a colander, drain and add to the bowl. Cook each ear of corn, still in the husk, in the microwave for 2 and a half minutes, then remove husk and take kernels off with a knife once cool enough to touch. Dice the spring onions, using all of the green part, and toss it in with the diced red onion, tomatoes, jalapeno and sweet peppers ( I like using a mix of red, green, orange and yellow).

Dress the salad by taste. Stir in the cilantro, juice from 1 lemon, juice from 3 or 4 limes, a sprinkle of olive oil and champagne vinegar (but go light on the oil and vinegar — you want the citrus to stand out). Add salt to taste, and add some freshly ground pepper. Depending on how juicy your limes are, the number of limes you want to use will vary.

I like dressing this ahead of time so everything absorbs some of the citrus flavor. This is a great, hearty and bright salad for serving a large number of people.

Pork Tenderloin Marinade

Large handful of parsley, chopped
Several sprigs of fresh oregano, leaves removed and chopped
4 large cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tbsp Olive oil
1 tbsp dijon mustard
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
Pinch of fresh pepper

I made this marinade for use on three pork tenderloins — the amounts are ballpark but you can’t really go wrong here. With a mortar and pestle, mash up the garlic and herbs. Stir in the rest of the ingredients then rub all over the pork. Cover and place in the fridge for several hours, then grill by searing the pork and then cooking on a cooler part of your grill until the meat hits the right point of firmness.

Side note: I was cooking on my brother-in-law’s grill the other weekend and I was reminded how difficult it is to work with unfamiliar equipment. I totally overcooked the chicken. On my own grill, where I know how and where heat distributes, I was really pleased with getting these tenderloins perfect. Lisl laughed and said it shows just how tough those Top Chef challenges are when they get thrown into crazy circumstances.

Shallot & Lemon Salad Dressing

There’s nothing rocket science here, but I’m addicted to the following salad and dressing and figured I would make a note of it:

Mince up a big shallot (or more than one shallot) and let the shallots sit for 20 to 30 minutes in the juice from 1 lemon and a couple splashes of champagne wine vinegar. Then wisk in some olive oil, a dab of dijon mustard, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Toss over a bunch of baby arugula (rocket), with some nice tomatoes and maybe some sliced mushrooms or red pepper. Can’t beat it.

Addendum

I’ve had Disqus installed on my tech blog forever and I *finally* have it installed here. I much prefer the threaded comment system and after a few goes, it looks like it has imported all the old comments.

Cauliflower, Fennel and Potato Mash

This was a delicious variation on cauliflower mash that I threw together and wanted to remember. The fennel adds a bit of sophistication, but it was still wolfed down by our 4 year old.

1 head of cauliflower
1 large fennel bulb
2 or 3 medium potatoes
2 tbsp butter
heavy cream
salt and pepper

Cut the fennel bulb into eighths (halve, halve again, halve again), and chop the cauliflower into similar sized pieces. Peel and quarter the potatoes. Fill a large pot with about 1/2 inch of water (so the vegetables are not totally immersed) and bring to a boil. Toss in the potatoes first, then everything else, cover so the steam is captured, and keep on a light boil until tender. Drain.

In batches, spoon the vegetables into a food processor and puree (you will probably need to pulse, stir and push the fennel pieces down so they get fully pureed), and then spoon each batch of puree into a large bowl. Once you have everything pureed, add the butter, salt, pepper, and heavy cream to taste. Note: I usually make my mash potatoes with milk, not cream, but think the cream really works here.

This was a wonderful side dish, and I can see it being used as a nice base for either a hearty fish or chicken breasts. I’m imagining lots and lots of mushrooms…

Lulu’s Ratatouille (and the benefits of elbow grease)

ratatouille-lulu

I’ve been reading Julia Child’s My Life in France and the difficulties she faced trying to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In 1959, when Houghton Mifflin finally passed on the book, and before Knopf picked it up, Julia read a note from her champion at Houghton who explained the rejection, “They feel [the average housewife] wants ‘shortcuts to something equivalent’ instead of the perfect process to the absolute.”

America’s culture has changed a lot since then, but anyone who reads Simone de Beauvoir’s 1947 America Day by Day will be struck by how much has remained consistent. The business instincts of the Houghton execs remains somewhat true today if Rachel Ray’s empire is any evidence. Thankfully, there is room for more ambitious efforts, as Julia Child and Simone Beck proved and as new author/chefs continue to show; a recent example is Paul Bertolli’s almost literary Cooking by Hand.

Ratatouille strikes me as a perfect dish to highlight the merits of the two mindsets (and there are indeed merits to both). Sometimes I will throw together a ratatouille very quickly, let all the components stew together for a while unaided, and enjoy a perfectly good rendition. However, with a little more effort and time, you can take the dish to a different level entirely.

On Friday evening, after picking up some lovely fresh vegetables from the local farm, I rolled up my sleeves and put together an adaptation of Lulu Peyraud’s ratatouille from Richard Olney’s cookbook Lulu’s Provencal Table. It is considerably more involved than my usual, but the result, which we ate the next evening, was the sweetest, most delicious ratatouille I have had in a long while.

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Salsa: if you can’t beat the heat, join it!

There’s an old saying, “if you can’t beat em, join em.” It applies quite aptly to summertime heat and a good, fresh salsa don’t you think?

My current favorite method of salsa making is about as simple as it gets, and just relies on fresh ingredients.

Fresh Salsa
6 medium tomatillos, diced
2 large ripe tomatoes, diced
1 red onion, diced
5 or 6 spring onions, finely chopped (use all the green)
1 green pepper, diced
1 red pepper, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 to 3 fresh jalapenos, minced (add heat to personal taste; can also use cayenne or serrano)
juice of 1 to 2 limes, to taste
large bunch of cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp rice vinegar (or to taste)
salt and pepper to taste

Just chop everything up and combine in a bowl. Serve with some tortilla chips, or toast some bread with a little olive oil for a simple bruschetta, or serve as a garnish alongside a well-seasoned and grilled flank steak.

Don’t forget the beer. 🙂

Today Lisl had some friends from her choir over for lunch, and this went over quite well (we also had a hit with a black-eyed pea salad that was sort of a combination of this and this).

Below the fold, I’m attaching a few more photos from our recent trip up to the Catskills.

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Sauted Beet and Turnip Greens with Bacon and Legumes; misc food notes

Beet greens are a new, delightful discovery to me. For the longest time, I carried a grudge against beets for the appalling way they treated my childhood taste buds. My conclusion, at age 8, was only the only one logical, or even thinkable: like Romeo from Verona, the vegetable must be banished. Of course, my mother wished that I could think in terms of the Bard at that tender age, but I was probably too focused on drawing spaceships destroying each other with intricate multi-colored laser beams.

Lisl has brought many new things into my life which I find surprisingly enjoyable, like children (well, maybe the jury should be out on that one), washing up as I cook, pavlova (more on that below), and beets. Roasted beets with goat cheese, walnuts, and arugula. That’s so good, it doesn’t need to be a grammatically proper sentence. However I digress from the initial impetus of this post, which was me using more of the greens from the vegetables I purchase. Who knew that you could eat beet, turnip, radish, dandelion, etc etc greens? (Answer: many of you, but not me until last year!)

I purchased some beets with the greens still attached and fresh. I also found these baby turnips with their greens at the Kingston, NY farmers market (now open). When Lisl and I had dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns the other weekend (wonderful experience), one of my favorite elements was the simplest: raw baby turnips with a subtle dressing. And that is exactly how I ate the beauties in the above picture. But rather than throw out the greens, which I might have done in an earlier, more ignorant phase, I sauted them with the beet greens in this fairly classic combination:

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Cauliflower and Fennel Gratin (say “bechamel” 10 time fast)

My predilection for comfort dishes means that gratins, bechamel and cheese are recurring themes, but before I begin, forgive me a small rant: there is a fine line between a dish that is richly delicious, and one that is so packed with cream and butter that you can barely eat a second bite. Too many restaurants err on the wrong side of that line.

I remember reading the author of Cooking School Confidential write about learning the optimal way to prep potatoes for mashing in order to get as much butter into them as possible. My first reaction was “interesting” and my second was “maybe this is why I never like the mashed potatoes in restaurants.”

It reminds me of watching Anne Burrell explain, as she grabbed a huge handful of salt, how restaurant food is tasty because it is “better seasoned.” And I thought, “is that a euphamism for salty?” It is true that many tentative home cooks under-salt in the cooking process, but at least guests have a chance to rectify that. I find American Italian restaurants to be the worst offenders of over-salting.

This isn’t just about health, although that is relevant to this topic, but just the observation that more is not always better. I understand a restaurant’s desire to exude luxury, but you shouldn’t need a red wine strong enough to punch you in the jaw to make it through more than a few bites of a dish.

Now isn’t that a marvelously hypocritical way to introduce a dish with bechamel (one with more butter than flour even!) and cheese?! This dish is not something I would eat every night, but it was utterly delicious and while it went right smack up to the aforementioned line, it stayed just on the right side.

I’d quip that I ate my hypocrisy most happily, but perhaps the serious analysis is that the term “too rich” is subjectively like what the judge said about pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

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Pork Pastries with Pickled Onions, or The Stuffed Cabbage That Kept On Giving

stuffedcab-meat-pie-plated

I barely know how to start this post, or write it. It was the story of the recipe that turned into three. Our saga begins with our protagonist (that would be me) adapting a Richard Olney recipe for stuffed savoy cabbage. Enter cabbage stage left. Enter stuffing stage right. The audience gasps.

Now, I don’t know what kind of uber-cabbages Olney was eating in the south of France, but as my imaginary heckler would say, “zat stuffing will nevarre feet in zat cabbage! Zat ees not a vrai Franche cabbage!”

I had a lot of extra stuffing. I mean I had 6 pork pastries and a meatloaf worth of extra stuffing. But like all good tales, our protagonist learned along the way and came to a happy conclusion. The learnings: that I prefer to stuff individual leaves to an entire cabbage, and that this stuffing makes a damn good meat pastry/pie! Yes valiant readers, unlike a French movie, this tale ends happily (and with no cigarettes or accordian music either!).

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Stuffed Zucchinis with Pork, Ramp Greens, Asiago, Crème Fraîche and Lemon Zest

What defines a “comfort” dish? Sentimentality, based on good home cooking? Texture? Ingredients? Process? Rustic presentation? I can’t quite put my finger on it. This particular dish qualifies, but perhaps anything with the word “stuffed” in its name stacks the deck a little too steeply in its favor. It is interesting how a word so derogative when applied to humans becomes so delightful when applied to food.

As I mentioned the other day, Gourmet Worrier’s recipe for Qarabaghli mimli bil-laham caught my eye. I ran with the concept, and created my own version, which combines ground pork shoulder, some nicely smoked bacon, aged asiago cheese, breadcrumbs, crème fraîche… oh nevermind, the recipe is below the fold!

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Ramps, Ramps, and Ramp Fritters

Easter Sunday was a bit unusual for me this year. I spent the morning with family, but ever-patient Lisl gave me special dispensation to spend the afternoon tromping around the woods with a bunch of other food bloggers collecting wild ramps, fiddleheads, stinging nettles, wild garlic, and more. This outing was organized by Marc of No Recipes (who has a full write-up of the event and resulting menu on his blog, along with some great photos) and Jonathan of Lab 24/7.

(Clockwise from top-left: ramps; stinging nettles; fiddleheads; non-edible but pretty flowers)

I now understand the special appreciation people have for ramps. Douse them in olive oil and sea salt and toss under the broiler for a few moments, and the results will make you go weak in the knees. Since Sunday, I have also eaten pickled ramps, sauteed ramps with the drippings from a roast chicken, made ramp fritters (recipe below), and later this week will be making a ramp risotto. One has to strike when the iron is hot!

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Potatoes In Beer

This is a simple yet surprisingly sophisticated dish from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. I’ve long been a fan of making scalloped potatoes with milk and/or cream. The use of beer makes the dish a little less rich, which can be a good thing, yet still flavorful, and the onions add a sophistication that I really enjoyed.

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