Posts Tagged ‘Six Seasons: a New Way with Vegetables’

14 Apr

Spontaneous Salads, and easy tahini dressing

Posted by wooddogs3 in front yard gardening, greens, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , .

Years ago I wrote a review of Six Seasons: A New way With Vegetables. It remains a cookbook that I refer back to periodically and from which I have derived a lot of useful concepts. One of my favorites is the use of a “pad“ of some proteinaceous material, often whipped seasoned ricotta cheese or seasoned nut butter, underneath a salad to catch the dribbles of delicious dressing and add substance to the meal.

In this particular case chef McFaddens idea came back to me when I had nothing planned for lunch and was very hungry. Available in the refrigerator were a bag of washed and dried arugula leaves, a jar of the tahini dressing that I always keep around in warm weather, and the remains of a bowl of hummus, eating down to about half a cup in the bottom of the bowl. I decided that this would be my pad. I piled arugula leaves on top and drizzled tahini dressing over the leaves, and ate it. Simple as that. I was so eager to eat something that I had not scraped the little dried bits off the side of the hummus bowl, and that turned out to be such a good thing that I featured them in the photograph, because they were little areas of concentrated flavor when I scraped them up while eating. The hummus in the bottom was delicious on its own but was greatly improved by the arugula and the tahini dressing that dripped down to it. Very simple, and a really good reason to pick your salad greens when they are ready, wash and spin them, and keep them ready in the refrigerator. You’ll eat a lot more of them that way.

Tahini dressing is frequently found throughout the Middle East, in Israel, in northern Africa, and in many kitchens in America because it is so tasty and easy to make. There are probably as many variations as there are cooks to make it. I am very attached to my own formula but I will tell you where it deviates from the classic one and you can make your own decisions.

There are probably as many variations as there are cooks who make it. I am very attached to my own formula but I will tell you where it deviates from the classic one and you can make your own decisions.

Start with very good tahini. I like the Soom brand best, and it is hard to find in many areas but easily available online. Or use your own favorite. Stir it up smooth, put a half cup in the bowl of a little mini prep food processor, add a clove of garlic and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, process until the garlic is thoroughly chopped, add a half teaspoon of salt and a quarter cup of Greek yogurt and process a minute more, and add water a couple of tablespoons at a time as you continue to process. When the water hits the tahini, it will magically become very thick and creamy, and then will gradually thin out as you add more water. When you have achieved the consistency that you want, stop adding water. Check if it needs more lemon juice and salt by tasting, and then add a pinch of roasted ground cumin. I  don’t advise using raw cumin. In warm weather I always keep some cumin around that is roasted in a skillet just until it turns one shade darker and then ground in the spice grinder, but you can leave it out and add a dash of ground chipotle chile for a different but equally good effect. The yogurt is a bit unusual in tahini dressing, but I came across it a long time ago on a wonderful trip to Egypt and liked it and have been using it ever since. If you do not wish to try this, just substitute water and you will have the classic Israeli dribble sauce. Keep it in the refrigerator and it would be good for at least a week. It thickens when cold, but just beat in a little water with a fork until it’s back to the consistency that you want.

I have a mini-prep in the kitchen because I use it constantly for chopping garlic and ginger and other small tedious jobs, but if you don’t happen to have one, just chop the garlic finely with a knife or crush it with a little salt in a mortar and pestle, and use a whisk or fork to beat the yogurt and water into the tahini.

The hummus salad as described is vegetarian, and if you leave the yogurt out of the tahini dressing the whole dish becomes vegan. Your call.

13 Apr

Living in Interesting Times: Shortages

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, edible landscaping, farmers market, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, home food production, Nose-to-tail vegetables, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

When I talk with friends and neighbors about the current pandemic, I am sometimes surprised to encounter a firm fixed belief that there are no food shortages and won’t be any food shortages. Ask them if they’ve tried to buy flour or rice lately and you won’t receive a sensible reply. My own view is that in such situations there are potentially two kinds of shortages: short-term ones caused by panic-buying and hoarding, and longer-term ones caused by interruption of supply chains. Our current difficulty (at least in my area) in getting rice, flour, eggs, and toilet paper fall in the first category. Some people’s’ hoarding caused others to go without, and I’ll just add that there is a special place in hell reserved for those who hoard and price-gouge infant food, diapers, and other baby supplies. But there is lots of other stuff available and most of us will be just fine except for a little grousing.

The other kind of shortage, from interruption of production and transportation chains, is longer-term, hard to predict accurately, and potentially more worrisome. Without predicting disaster, I can only say that American agriculture depends heavily on immigrant labor, and you can review the Farm Bureau’s summary of this. I will quote only one startling fact from their statistics: “If agriculture were to lose access to all undocumented workers, agricultural output would fall by $30 to $60 billion.” Since to help contain the pandemic we are closing borders and tightening enforcement, I don’t see how the agricultural labor supply can be unaffected. This could translate to fruit unharvested and veggies decaying in the fields or not getting planted in the first place.

This is a long-winded way of saying that all food should be treated like the treasure it is. Don’t hoard it, and don’t waste it either. Look at what you have and let your imagination run wild about how you might use it. Relax your usual food restrictions unless they relate to religion or health. Taste things you might not ordinarily think about. Get a couple of good cookbooks about vegetables so that you’re ready to get the most out of available produce. Two that I highly recommend are Six Seasons and Vegetables Unleashed. Both are available in e-format and will help you make the most of any food available. Think creatively about what to make. Can’t get rice? Make lettuce wraps. We are not going to starve, not by a long shot, and we can better utilize our supply chain by being more flexible in our thinking.
The problem that I really worry about is not national and international supply chains but local ones. Huge ag corporations won’t be allowed to go under, but your area small farmers and stock raisers just might, or may be disheartened enough by plowing good vegetables back into the dirt that they don’t continue. So find out where they are and how you can buy their produce. In my area the growers’ markets will open in May but  will be limited to food only, and since it’s in the open air, this is probably safer than going to a grocery store. Use all recommended precautions, but support those growers.

Plant something of your own. This morning I was thinking about what I would grow if I only had one small garden bed to work with. Given a tiny little space four feet on a side, I would double-dig it, enrich the hell out of the soil, and plant Fordhook Swiss chard and tuck some thyme plants in at the edges. Chard produces heavily all summer regardless of heat if kept watered, and few things will do more for your health than eating more leafy greens. The taste is mild and acceptable to nearly everyone. The old reliable Fordhook is more productive and resilient than the newer fancier colors, and the stems offer a second vegetable with a different texture, great in stir-fries. It can be harvested all summer and then left in place to produce some early greens the following year. Chickens adore any leaves that you don’t get around to eating, and if you know any goats, they love the tough ends of the stalks, or just compost them. One packet of seed produces all the greens a small family can eat. I don’t know of a more nutritious and efficient vegetable. As for how to use it, click on the “greens” category in the sidebar on the right side of this page  for a dozen or more ideas, and that’s just the beginning.

 

 

 

 

8 Jun

The Oregon Giant Pea and the Taste of Early Summer

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, recipe, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, Vegetable dinners, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

I think that I have written before about my entrancement with the snap pea/sugar pea called Orgeon Giant. In my opinion, it’s the most delicious thing of its kind  and I gorge on this type for as long as its season lasts. I begin to harvest my early spring planting in late May, waiting until the pods are bulging but not round and making sure to pull the strings off, and at first I eat them blanched in boiling salted water for four minutes and then sautéed in butter with a pinch of salt for a couple of minutes. They go well next to everything.

But as the season gets into full swing, I have enough of them to get ambitious. I continue to be obsessed with Joshua  McFadden’s new cookbook Six Seasons,and tonight I happened to be struck by his addition of English peas to Pasta Carbonara. I don’t eat pasta for carby reasons, but it occurred to me that the traditional carbonara flavors, while rich, are also rather full and gentle, and might go wonderfully with sugar peas even if there were no pasta involved. I hasten to add that there is no question that a large plate full of sugar peas will not do anybody’s carbohydrate count any good. However, we all have our vices, and I do tend to allow anything green.

Have all the prepping done before you start cooking because it goes very fast.
So I started with 2 quarts of enormous peapods, loosely packed. I picked them over and pulled the strings off, and cut them diagonally into pieces roughly an inch long as you see above.
There is no question that piggy products do peas a world of good. I did not happen to have the classic carbonara ingredient pancetta on hand and so I decided to use a thick slice of mild applewood smoked bacon. I cut it into cubes a little bigger than 1/4 inch square. I chopped two cloves of fresh garlic very fine, finely  chopped a small onion, grated about a cup+ of very good Parmesan, and separated out the yolks of three eggs. A quarter cup of heavy cream ended up smoothing out the mixture.

The bacon cubes were rendered gently over medium heat, and the onion and garlic thrown in when they were about half cooked. This mixture was cooked together until the onions were cooked soft without allowing it to color, and meanwhile a couple of quarts of salted water were brought to a fast boil. The heat was turned off under the bacon mixture, and the chunks of pea pods thrown into the salted water and cooked for exactly 4 minutes. The pea pods were drained well in a strainer but not shaken totally dry, and then returned to the hot saucepan, the bacon mixture added, the cream poured in, and sautéed over medium heat for about a minute. Now, working very fast off the heat and stirring  continually with a wooden spoon because a metal spoon would break up the peapods, the egg yolks were added and tossed around for a little under a minute, until the cream looked a bit thickened. Then the Parmesan was tossed in off the heat. When the sauce amalgam look thick and creamy, about a half teaspoon of freshly ground pepper was stirred in and the dish was immediately plated. You can add a little more cheese on the top if you like. Serve hot with some additional black pepper ground over the top.
This may be the purest expression of the sugar snap pea pod, somehow even more classic than the simple blanched pods. The pods retain some texture, and the swollen peas that float around the finished dish are pure essence of early summer. This is a main dish  and if you accompany it with some good white wine, you are very unlikely to want anything 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.