Well some very intriguing news came in the form of a phone call from the executive producer of Iron Chef America, who asked if I’d be interested in being a judge for the upcoming season. And the answer was, “Yes!” We tape in NYC in late June — more updates as developments unfold, but for now, woohoo!
My local Chinese market was selling two trays of the fat rice noodles often used in chow fun (which is now apparently called shenen fen) for the price of one, so I picked up a duo-pack and set about making dinner. These noodles are nice because they don’t require any boiling: just make a stirfry of choice, and incorporate the noodles. This round got fresh ginger, carrots, a leek, a few diced anchovies, half a bunch of kale, and a handful of goji berries, all sauted in macadamia oil blend (which I’m liking very much lately — it’s made by the good folks at Jungle Products, in Sonoma). The noodles kind of broke up a bit (they’re quite delicate), resulting in tender blobs (in a good way) that reminded me of gnocchi, a nice countertexture agains the snappy, crisp veggies. A dash of umami salt really set the entire dish spinning with umami (boosted by the anchovies). Do this in a nonstick pan; if it starts to stick (the noodles get sticky), just add a little chicken stock, carrot juice, or water. A quick and very tasty dinner.
I couldn’t believe how many products with goji berries I saw at the Fancy Food Show this year. We seem to require a new superfood every year (blueberries and pomegranate have dominated this category over the past two to three years), and I think it might be goji’s turn. In a perfect mirroring of this trend, I’ve seen them for sale in fancy health food stores and, heaven forbid, farmers’ markets, anywhere from $12 to $25/pound, but I was able to pick them up in my local market in Chinatown for $2.39/pound. Chinese just eat them, probably oblivious to the trend’s current status (and the Chinese merchants, miraculously, must be unaware of how much they could actually charge per pound, with the right marketing), whereas we “better health through better food” people seek some kind of nutritional botox effect from them.
They’re sort of like a cross between a dried cranberry and a rasin. Sort of! They are in any case the perfect fruity chewy foil for a large bunch of hyperfresh kale, trimmed of its stems. Dice and saute a red onion in fat of choice (I used macadamia oil, which was delicious, but this could be done with olive oil, butter, ghee, or a combo of these). While the onion softens, rinse the trimmed kale and chop into 1-inch segments, and add to the onions once they’re nice and soft. Add plenty of salt (of choice) and pepper. I also tossed in some ground fennel seed, which seemed to add some complexity to it, but this could easily be omitted. Then a big handful of goji berries. Just saute for a few more minutes, and you’ll soon see what a delightful combination this is; it also has the added bonus of being extremely pretty, not to mention about as healthful as it gets. Try a big bowl of it, and notice how you feel afterward–completely sated yet happy and light enough to want to go for a nice long walk.
I once asked a vegetarian friend why she avoided meat.
“Oh, I have nothing against meat,” she said, then squinted a little. “It’s just that I HATE vegetables.”
But seriously: why do so many people dislike vegetables? I think the widespread distaste for vegetables is more or less a rational decision, since so few people know how to prepare them in any way save boiling or steaming, and the results are often fairly disgusting. When I was a kid, pretty much all our veggies came from a can. It was my job to pick which can to open (I usually went for canned corn, which I still kinda like, though frozen has pretty much replaced it). On the rare occasions we did have fresh vegetables, they might get a pat of margarine and a dusting of some iodized table salt and pepper that had been ground literally years before. Blech!
Kids are notorious for not liking fresh veggies, but I know quite a few adults, too, who look at the forlorn broccoli floret on their plate as the price they have to pay for their meat entree.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Ninety percent of eating a delicious, vegetable-heavy diet is shopping. Start with great vegetables, and it’s VERY difficult to screw them up. Conversely, it’s very hard to make crappy industrial vegetables taste great, no matter what you do to them.
I’ve had my vegetable world turned upside down recently by the fine folks at Mariquita Farm out of Watsonville. Julia Wiley and Andy Griffin have long been sought out at farmers’ markets around the Bay Area (though they no longer do any at all), and the list of Bay Area restaurants that buy their spectacular produce is a who’s who of the very best. Their CSA is filled to capacity/booked solid, so no hope of getting on that, but they do offer the intriguing “Mysterious Thursday,” when Julia drives up to SF and unloads, for $25, what has to be the best-looking box of vegetables to be found anywhere.
The photo above is a portion of the box I got last week. I’ve never had, let alone cooked, agretti before, but man is it good. I made a terrific breakaway mapo dofu out of it by sauteing onions, ground beef and Chinese plum sauce, then adding harissa, half cake of soft tofu, and four or five cups of chopped agretti. The agretti made the dish sing by providing green tangy notes and a most pleasing popping texture.
Also in the box were lamb’s quarter’s (a delightful green), baby purple artichokes, dino kale, asparagus, baby turnips, tons of leeks, deliciously sweet salad greens, fancy carrots, favas, herbs, and plenty else. We managed to eat the entire box in four days!
But the point is: with vegetables this good, you WANT to eat them. You can’t help it. So that, it seems, is the trick — to find a supply of incredibly inspiring produce. Farmers’ markets are a great place to look, but I’m liking the box from Mariquita very, very much. If any of you have a favorite CSA, let’s hear about it!
Peak beet season is coming to a close, though they miraculously seem to stay around for most of the year in many places. I’ve eaten a huge quantity this year, but I’m still buying them every time I see them.
I was feeling lazy about doing beet tartare (if any of you reading this have not tried this recipe from The Breakaway Cook, it’s one of my favorites in the book), so just decided to drain the boiled golden beets and toss them in the blender along with some milk, chicken stock, and tangerine juice, along with plenty of s&p (the salt was dried tangerine salt). Victory declared! If I was feeling fancier, I probably would have sieved it once, to give a smoother texture, but I was so hungry and it tasted so good that I pretty much wolfed it down (with plenty of leftovers). And just for fun I had the last remnants of some Thai basil, so pureed that in blender along with some olive oil and drizzled the green goo on top. A keeper! Served with a dollop of full-fat Greek yogurt and a hunk of La Brea whole grain, barely toasted.
I think I’m one of those cooks who isn’t hugely influenced by the weather: I often make big salads for dinner on cold days, and braise a pork shoulder in the middle of the summer (then again, I have the excuse that SF summers are freezing). If I I see that I’ve got a ham hock that is requesting my attention, I , like many others, automatically think “pea soup,” even on warm days like today. I did indeed have a bag of dried peas (I try always to keep a bag in my pantry), so we were off to the races. I’m almost never without carrots and onions, so I chopped them up fairly finely, threw them in the soup pot with a few strips of bacon, and gently sauteed until the fat released and everything started getting soft.
From there, I put in a pound of dried peas and the ham hock (chopped up a bit). Everything was looking so nice that I couldn’t help but snap this picture of it, before even adding any liquid, knowing that the army-green color it would eventually take on wouldn’t be quite as photogenic. From the state in the photo, it was just a matter of adding a quart of chicken stock, and about another quart of water, bringing to a boil, and simmering for about two hours. Thick, porky, meaty pea soup emerged. I used smoked paprika salt at the end to add even more smoky goodness (it had both smoke and umami from the bacon and from the hock). I’m in a bit of a rut with this soup, because the flavors are so good together, but I’m always looking for different ways to eat pea soup, so if anyone’s got a good one, please speak up!
A few months ago I was due to give a talk at Diesel bookstore, in Rockridge, along with Molly Katzen, Elizabeth Falkner, and a few other cookbook writers. I showed up on time, and met the bookstore manager. She looked both surprised and very worried, and asked me if I was okay, and to step into her office.
It wasn’t good, whatever it was.
It turns out that someone identifying themselves as Eric Gower had called the bookstore several hours before, claiming that a thief had broken into his car. His computer, which contained his only pictures of his mother (!) was stolen, and he had no way to get to the bookstore on time. He needed the bookstore to wire him $150, pronto, in order to make the event.
In one sense the story was so preposterous that it was amusing, and I got through the event ok, but in another, it was scary. Why in the world would *I* be chosen?? Jesus, couldn’t they find someone a little, I dunno, more well-known than an obscure cookbook writer? But maybe, in an odd way, it might be more plausible for that very reason.
I then brushed off the event as just another wacky manifestation of the times we live in, and forgot all about it. Until this morning, when the LA Times ran a story on how this “bookstore author scam” is gaining momentum. For any bookstore owners reading this, beware!
Well, at least I’m good company, with Nick Hornby.
I don’t know what it is about pestos that keeps me coming back. I fully realize that pestos are fraught with the danger of cliche, given their role in some of the not-so-successful early-stage fusion, with well-meaning chefs and their attempts at edginess to establish market-leading trends. But I think that, as always, by keeping things extremely simple, pestos are real boons to breakaway cooks.
As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of frozen peas. I find them in some sense vastly superior to fresh peas — which in any case are only available for a few weeks out of the year — the now-high-tech freezing processes ensure that supervibrant garden-y pea flavor. And lordy, is it convenient to just have a stash in the freezer at all times. For this pesto, I had the last part of a fresh bag of spinach to use up, plus the classic breakaway ingredients of frozen peas, carrot juice, umami salt, and a little milk. I didn’t even bother thawing the peas, just a few cups directly into the blender with the following:
I could have eaten and really enjoyed the udon with just this — and in warmer weather, this is excellent served cold — but I also had some crimini mushrooms on deck, ready for use, along with a piece of a yam that I decided to cut into thin, matchstick strips, and a leek. I decided to saute these together to create a quick little topping:that would give the dish some good texture and give it even more umami goodness (criminis, like all mushroooms, are jam-packed with umami, as are yams, as are leeks when they melt):
Into the saute pan they went, along with some ghee, as I waited for the water to heat up to cook the udon. And lo and behold, out of the deep-freeze came a salmon filet, bless its rare flesh, purchased long before this year’s ban — it was time for this to end its frozen isolation. It got a quick crust of my standard coriander, fennel, black pepper, and plenty of salt and pan fried in cast iron.
More ambitious than I had originally planned, but well worth the tiny extra effort involved.
Make frozen peas your friend! And let me know if you know any innovative or favorite use of them.
This thing was truly a bottom-of-the-barrel dish that came out way better than I had imagined it would, so much so that I thought I’d share it. It had been almost two weeks since I’d gone shopping, and there was, seemingly, NOTHING in the fridge. But, it’s amazing what can happen when you have a few stray carrots, onions, and mushrooms if you mince the hell out of them and throw enough umami at it. The shrooms were not at their peak, shall we say, but oddly, this seemed to add to their deliciousness. This thing just popped with flavor, and I’ll be making it again and again, of that I’m sure.
Here’s what I put into my claypot:
Saute onion, carrots, shrooms, tomatoes, and star anise in olive oil for about five minutes, until they soften. Add the beef, if using, and plenty of s&p. While that cooks, whisk together the eggs and persimmon puree (not everyone has persimmon puree in their freezer, including me most of the time. An excellent substitute would be dried fruit — apricot, figs, plums, maybe papaya — softened in boiling water, then blended to a puree). Add that to the pot, mix well, and liberally toss on some seasoned breadcrumbs, made in the spice grinder by blending a small piece of stale bread, some optional freshly ground coriander, black pepper, and salt. Bake at 400 (no lid) for about 20 minutes. If the breadcrumbs aren’t toasty-crispy on top — though they should be — put it under the broiler for a minute or two, which will definitely crisp it up. Really nice with a glass of ancient vine zin.
I’ve drawn a cool little schemata/diagram of the three essential components of breakaway cooking. For some reason I can’t get it to post here, but do check it out by clicking here. Let me know if you can think of anything to add!
