Posts Tagged ‘fresh vegetables’

28 Feb

Roasted Vegetable Harissa

Posted by wooddogs3 in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Anyone who enjoys the foods of northern Africa is familiar with harissa, the chile-based condiment that often accompanies the meal. It comes in innumerable variations, from a chile-hot thick “broth” ladled into soup or over couscous to a thick paste of chiles (either toasted or not,) vegetables (cooked or not,) seasonings, and oil.

This particular iteration is rather like a thick, textured mayonnaise with the emulsion based on roasted vegetables instead of egg. It‘s a variation on the recipe for Mo’s Harissa in Wild Flavors by Didi Emmons, but Ms. Emmons’s version just dries out the vegetables in a warm oven for a little while, while I like them actually roasted. 
For the hot element, I dip into a small canning jar kept in my refrigerator in which I keep one large or two small cans of chipotles in adobo that have been put through the blender with just enough olive oil to keep the blades turning. It adds a mildly smoky garlicky hot element that makes the harissa taste as if the vegetables were roasted over a wood fire. But you can also use a few toasted ground Guajillo chiles, or a couple of fresh jalapeño chiles roasted with the peppers, or even a heaping spoonful of Kashmiri chile flakes.

I make this in larger batches because we eat a lot of it and I give some away, but you can cut the recipe in half easily.

First, put a teaspoon of cumin seed and half a teaspoon of caraway seed in a small skillet and toast briefly over a medium flame just until the scent comes up. They shouldn’t darken more than a shade. Grind in a spice/coffee grinder or pound thoroughly in a mortar and pestle. Set aside.

Coarsely chop 3-4 cloves of garlic, and chop the stems of a bunch of cilantro. Save the leaves. Set aside.

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Then, start with your bell peppers. While making a run through a big box store I picked up a bag of six bell peppers, two each of red, orange, and yellow. You can use any combination of these colors that you want, and you can substitute a green bell pepper for one of the ripe ones if you want to. Wash the peppers, seed and core them, and cut them in chunks. Put them on a baking sheet. If you want to use fresh jalapeños for the hot element, seed and core one or two, cut in chunks, and add to the bell peppers. If you line the baking sheet with baking parchment, it will make your life easier later on. Roast at 325° for 30 minutes, then put the chopped garlic and chopped cilantro stems on the sheet too and continue roasting to your preferred degree of doneness, which for me is when they have a definitely roasted look as shown below. Keep the garlic by itself so that you can take it off the sheet if it’s browning too fast. Be sure not to let the garlic turn brown or burn.

Now put the roasted peppers, cilantro stems, and garlic in a food processor and process to a chunky paste. Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or a chopped quarter of a preserved lemon and a teaspoon of salt, more or less. Add your chipotle paste or toasted ground chiles if you didn’t use jalapeños. With the processor running, pour in very good olive oil in a slow stream until the texture is the way you want it. It’s hard to say how much oil you will use. Have at least a cup handy, and if you use less, no harm done. I aim for a smooth but textured gloppiness as shown in the top photo, but you could also make it in a blender instead of a food processor and blend it completely smooth if you wanted. Add the ground spices and taste for heat and salt. Adjust if needed. Scrape into a bowl and start putting it on stuff. 
I love cilantro leaves chopped over the top but don’t like the leaves blended into the harissa at all; it makes the texture odd and it doesn’t keep as long. But suit yourself.


I think this harissa has a particular affinity for eggs, and we recently made a quick meal of scrambled eggs and hot buttered basmati rice in a bowl with a lavish amount of harissa and chopped cilantro leaves. Delicious. I also like to make a spicy egg salad with hard-boiled eggs and harissa and pile it on a chunk of good baguette. 

Put a good spoonful alongside a greens borek or on top of horta. Or nearly anywhere else.

6 May

Food for Thought: A Cookbook for Cooking and for Thinking

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, Uncategorized, Vegetable dinners, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

I have been  vegetable gardening all of my adult life, and own several shelves full of vegetable cookbooks, and I have a very high bar when it comes to buying new ones.  Actually, that’s not true. I buy new ones in a fairly promiscuous fashion because that is my addiction, but I have a very high bar indeed for recommending that other people spend their hard-earned money on them.

So  here’s what I have to say about  Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables by Joshua McFadden: go buy it.  Now. Read it. Think about it.  It really will bring you to think in a new way about how to handle familiar vegetables.  Take salads, for instance. I like salads well enough but am almost never really excited by them.  They always seem a little predictable to me, and just throwing some meat, cheese, or eggy thing of some kind on top does not make them interesting in my view. McFadden’s  way of putting a substantial “pad” of seasoned nut butter sauce, savory seasoned whipped cream, whipped seasoned ricotta cheese, or other interesting  possibilities underneath the salad does make them seem new and like a real meal that I am happy to eat.

As good as the recipes are, I put this one in the “thinking cookbook” category,  i.e. an idea-rich cookbook that will affect the food you put on the table whether you were actually following a recipe from the cookbook or not.  Take the salad shown above, for example.  I had a lot of lettuce in the garden, including some dark red lettuce that still looked beautiful but had grown the slightest bit bitter  in hot weather.  I kept tasting bits of the leaves, thinking about what would make them taste good.  Ultimately, I whipped and seasoned some homegrown goat ricotta  with olive oil and salt, and smeared the plates with it, then arranged the red lettuce and some sweet green lettuce on top.  Then I put some of the ricotta mixture in the blender with an egg yolk and two cloves of roasted garlic, blended in more olive oil and some salt, and acidified it with lemon juice and white wine vinegar until it tasted just right, added some chopped marjoram because it seemed to fit in well, and used that as the dressing. I slivered shallot greens, soaked them in cold water briefly as McFadden recommends, pressed dry, and scattered them all over, and finished with warm leftover steak and bright sweet crunchy slivers of kumquat rind. The earthy rich ricotta dressing made the faintly bitter lettuce just right and complemented the steak beautifully, and dripped down to the whipped ricotta beneath to season it, while the kumquat rind added an electric zing.   Delicious and interesting to eat. It isn’t a McFadden recipe per se  but was entirely inspired by his methods and I would not have come up with it without reading his book.

The cooked vegetable recipes are very good too, as are the techniques. Just to name one, McFadden recommends grilling your vegetables “dry,” i.e. without oil, and then drizzling them with olive oil afterwards on the grounds that the burnt oil produces strange chemical flavors.   Even if you like the ones grilled in oil, I think you’ll like his method better. Try it and see.  I am also a fan of his section on pickles. These are not pickles that you can put on your shelf and keep forever. They are quick, delicate refrigerator pickles that serve as seasoning and garnish and add wonderful nuances to the flavor of vegetables.

This is a useful and excellent book at any price,  but I do wish to point out that the Kindle version is a special bargain and I highly recommend it.

20 Feb

Spring Alliums

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, fish and seafood, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, Nose-to-tail vegetables, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , .

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One of the many reasons that I love green garlic and green alliums generally is that they are among the earliest things to come out of the garden, assuming that you planted in early fall. I have plenty of summer veggies in my freezer, but as the days start to lengthen I get ravenously keen for the first real, fresh greens, and by mid-February I’m eating out of the garden again.

For early green alliums, plant some in a block that you can cover with Agribon or other frost blanket material. I like to put a short row of my regular yellow storage onions in this block in September, and each will divide and make four or five superbly sweet green onions in early spring.

Garlic is another must, and my favorite for early green garlic is Chinese Pink, because it is super-early and is eight inches tall and half an inch in diameter by mid-February if frost protection is used. Plant your early block with the cloves about three inches apart each way. When I’m ready for green garlic I pull alternate stalks, and leave the rest 6″ apart to mature for my earliest garlic bulb harvest.

In the case of leeks, there isn’t even any need to replant in fall. Plant extra in spring, cover with frost blanket in late fall, and they will winter over nicely for February eating.

Contrary to much popular advice, I don’t suggest that you even think about cutting the green leaves off and discarding them. They are delicious. They are also the healthiest part of the plant, full of the antioxidant allicin which has multiple health benefits. Do cut them in fine cross-sections, about a quarter inch long, to  eliminate  any possible stringiness  in the leaves.

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I love a good assortment of green alliums chopped up and sautéed in butter with salt to taste until they are succulent and sweet. Keep the heat medium-low and let them cook at least twenty minutes for best flavor. I eat them as a side dish, but they would also be great on slices of crisp baguette, in an omelette, over scrambled eggs or rice,  on a broiled fish fillet, or nearly any other way that you can imagine.

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Two years ago I stuck some garlic cloves in a flower bed planning to harvest them for green garlic, but forgot all about them in spring. After two growing seasons they’ve divided so much that the leaves are as fine as grass. I’ve started harvesting the tops and chopping them finely to use as a fresh seasoning. They have a stronger but cleaner flavor than garlic chives. I love them over egg salad, green salad, broiled or grilled meats, on soup, or anywhere that you might crave a hit of freshness and garlic. They give some distinction to a regular or low-carb pizza.