Deborah Madison's Blog, page 6

Weird Wrappings or Where to Put the Tangerine?

Sometimes it's the wrapper more than the gift that's remembered.

Eat More Kale!

And A Very Happy New Year to All!

My Accidental Near-Vegan New Years Menu

I didn't set out to have a vegan New Year's Dinner, but sometimes it just happens that way.

Two Long Roots: Salsify and Scoroznera

When's the last time you had salsify roots in your kitchen? They make a pretty good chowder in case you have a stash.

Mouse Nibbles and High Winds

Sometimes the strange harvest of a winter garden holds some surprises.

Color and Carrots

Do colors and flavors always match, and what do we do with these different colored carrots?

The Chard Among the Goosefoots

Chard is a goosefoot (who knew?) and oh so good in the kitchen.

The Chard Among the Goosefoots

The goosefoot family of plants, the chenopodiaceae, is one we’re all pretty familiar with even if we don’t know its longish name.  It includes spinach, beets, and chard, but also a host of edible wild (and cultivated) plants collectively known as “quelites”.  Among them are lambs quarters, magentaspreen, orach, pigweed, and the cultivar, Good King Henry.  Quinoa and huanzontle also reside here, as do a number of wild desert plants, like Four Wing Saltbush.  All have masses of small edible seeds. Some, like huanzontle, are eaten while they’re still in their flower form. Others, like quinoa, are eaten once the seeds have formed and dried. Some of these are amaranths which used to be botanically closer but are still pretty similar in some respects, especially taste. Below is a bouquet of amaranths from a farmers market in Arlington, MA.

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One botany book of mine succinctly sums up the goosefoots as a group of rank and weedy plants, which some clearly are. Epazote, the only herb in the family, certainly could be described that way, as can a number of the wild goosefoots that grow around my neighborhood. When I note the summer pollen index in the morning paper, much of it is due to the “chenopods”, the wild weedy ones just going to flower in June

But why goosefoot? Because the leaves are supposedly the shape of a goose’s foot. And they are, sort of. And how do I know? While visiting a u-pick berry farm in the Cuyahoga National Park, a small flock of geese had gathered behind a fence. As my friend and I approached their enclosure they ran towards us, their long necks outstretched, hissing with unbridled menace because while we were proper visitors to the farm, in their eyes we were also likely to be thieves. I asked the farmer if he’d be willing to pick up a goose and show me its foot so I could see its shape. He did so, thrusting a big, orange leathery-looking claw-like appendage in my face. It was a powerful looking foot, but its shape was both broader and simpler than I had expected. It didn’t match up exactly with the shape of the leaves in this family, although it did roughly enough.  This webbed foot was rather broad and many goosefoot leaves like spinach and chard, are narrow.  Maybe some geese have narrower feet? Still, it is possible to see the resemblance, especially when you think of other leaves in other families that have absolutely no similarity, like artichokes and salsify, two members of the daisy family.

Aside from the one herb, the seeds and the beetroot, the edible parts of this family consist mostly of leafy greens (also reds purples, and magentas), tender leaves that are edible raw when young, cooked when older, and highly nutritious at any stage. There are not nearly as many edibles as in other families, like the cruciferous (cabbage) family or the solanaceae (tomatoes, potaotes, eggplant), but they are all easy to prepare, not difficult to grown, and they pair well with one another in all sorts of ways. The greens of these various plants are essentially interchangeable and taste very much the same, the wild ones being somewhat stronger.

Among them, I’m partial to chard.  It grows pretty much easily everywhere. It yields edible stalks as well as extremely handsome leaves. Just the appearance those thick leaves with their bubbled surfaces, not to mention the translucent golden, rose and purple stems of the rainbow variety, make my mouth water, even though chard isn’t as exciting as, say, mustard greens or broccoli raab. It is, however, ever reliable, useful, and can be prepared in all sorts of ways. Just steaming or braising the leaves until they’re tender, then turning them in some good olive oil, sea salt and pepper flakes is a simple act that goes far in the taste department. Chard is always compatible with lentils (in a soup) and potatoes (added to boiled ones or a mash.)  My favorite frittata, the Provencale trouchia, is based on slowly cooked chard and onions with basil. Another dish I never tired of is chard cooked leisurely in its own moisture with a few tablespoons of rice and a lot of cilantro, cumin and garlic. You don’t end up with a lot, but the few bites you get are intensely satisfying. Chard can also serve as somewhat neutral but bulk-supplying element when cooked in a soup with stronger tasting but less substantial greens, such as sorrel, nettles, and lovage. It can stuff a crepe or nestle into a lasagna. The combination of eggplant and chard is oddly meaty. The leaves can also be used to harbor fillings. And on and on.

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All in all chard is an extremely useful green that can be led in this and that direction depending on its herb or spice companions. And you know what else you can do with it?  You can put the leaves in a vase and put them on the table to admire for a day, then cook it. Here’s a recipe from my work in progress, “Vegetable Literacy”.

Chard, Ricotta and Saffron Cakes with Micro Greens Makes 12 3-inch cakes

These can serve as a tidy little nibble for a pass-around, made slightly larger for a first course, or large still for a vegetable main course.

Enough chard to make 10 to 12 cups trimmed leaves

2 pinches saffron threads

1 cup white whole -wheat pastry flour or spelt flour

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

2 farm eggs

1 cup ricotta cheese

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

¾ cup whole milk

3 tablespoons olive oil or ghee

Thick yogurt or sour cream and micro greens

Wash the leaves and cook them in a covered pot until they are wilted and tender but not overcooked, so keep an eye on them and taste them frequently once they’ve wilted. When done, put the greens in a colander and set them aside to cool and drain.

Cover the saffron threads with 2 tablespoons boiling water and set aside.

In one bowl, mix the flour with the salt and baking powder. In another bowl, mix the ricotta, cheese, eggs and milk together. Add the oil, butter and steeped saffron threads, then whisk in the flour mixture.

Returning to the greens, squeeze out as much water as possible, then chop them finely and stir them into the batter.

Heat a pan with olive oil, ghee or butter.  Drop batter onto the pan, making small or larger cakes as you wish, and cook over medium-low heat. The batter is quite thick and it will not behave exactly like a pancake.  You need to give it plenty of time in the pan and it will still be very moist. Cook over moderate heat until golden on the bottom, then turn the cakes once, resisting any urge to pat them down, and cook until the second side is also well-colored.  Serve each with a spoonful of sour cream and a garnish of micro greens.

 

Color and Carrots

Carrots are on my mind for two reasons. One is that I keep unearthing giant monsters from my garden. The second is that I seem to have ordered 9 seed packets for different carrot varieties so I know it’s going to be a carrot year. I didn’t know that I liked carrots that much. It’s more that I wanted to learn the differences that distinguish different varieties from life rather than looking at a picture—their shapes, flavors, and colors.

Strange how important color can be in food. As a college student I worked in a lab at UC Davis where ice creams were different colors than their flavors would suggest. We gave them to students to eat and asked them to identify the flavors, which they found very hard to do.  Banana isn’t usually green; pistachio isn’t pink, strawberry isn’t yellow. Without the colors in their right places, the tasters were stumped. We put colors and flavors together in very particular ways, it turns out, and with the ice cream flavors matched with their colors, there as no problem and much relief.  As kids, my brother, who worked for a different lab at UC Davis,and I thought it would be amusing to make blue mashed potatoes from the Peruvian tubers he was studying. We thought it would be fun because it would be off-putting, and it was. There aren’t a lot of blue foods, maybe for a reason. Except for blueberries and blue corn flour, blue does not invite one to dig in.

Which brings me back to carrots.

Even though lots of people are growing them and buying them, it seems a bit fussy to call for particular colors of carrots in a recipe. If I saw a recipe for a white carrot and cumin puree, I might think, “Oh? And what’s wrong with orange?”  But if white carrots are what you have, well, you give things a try.  I’ve had a lot of them, very late harvest, gigantic white carrots that I keep finding buried in the ground. Naturally  I wondered what would happen if I made a white carrot soup. It would taste like carrot, but it wouldn’t look like carrot. Would my guests know what they were eating?

Garden writer, Leslie Land, who ate this soup, thought that blindfolded, one might guess that it was based on potato and something rooty. In fact, there was not potato (just a tablespoon of rice). She then put for the idea that flavor is associated with pigment and that orange carrots have more flavor—an idea she has promised to research the minute she gets home. It’s true—the flavor was not robust, though to me it was clearly carrot. But maybe because they were pretty old carrots was why they weren’t’ more carroty. The jury is still out on the flavor component.

I suspect that a white carrot soup can mess with your head. It tastes like carrot but looks like potato, parsnip, celery root, anything but carrot.  A soup made of yellow ones is less disturbing, slightly more carroty, and in fact, pretty and delicate to behold.  If you use those purple skinned orange carrots in a soup, though, you’ll end up with the ugliest brown soup you can imagine. I did that once and I couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t’ get past the color. But the flavor was amazing which suggests there might be something to Leslie’s theory.

I’ve been using my lighter colored carrots in an almond-carrot cake where they work beautifully, giving the cake a soft, rich golden hue instead of intermittent orange streaks.  I recently braised some yellow carrots with orange cores that I bought from Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, tossed them with coconut butter and lime and they were gorgeous (and quite worth eating). Roasted purple carrots mixed yellow, white, and a few orange ones are full of drama, but the inclusion of the orange fellows lets you know that you’re eating carrots. Going back to the soup, I thought that a very fine dice of orange carrots plus the tender greens would be helpful, letting you know where you are in the vegetable world, and so I did just that.

Ivory Carrot Soup with A Fine Dice of Orange                                                      Makes about 5 cups

This is an extremely simple soup, intentionally so, as I was just going for the purity of color and flavor. Try it also with the pale yellow carrots, but not so much the purple skinned ones. They turn brown.

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, thinly sliced

1 pound of white carrots, scrubbed and thinly sliced

1 tablespoon raw white rice

sea salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

A sprig of thyme

4 cups water or light chicken stock

A few tablespoons finely diced orange (and/or other colored carrots, for garnish) plus some of the finer greens, chopped

Warm the butter and oil in a soup pot, add the onion, carrots, rice 1 teaspoon salt and sugar. Cook over medium heat for several minutes, turning everything occasionally.

Add one cup of the water or stock, cover the pan, turn down the heat, and cook while you heat the remaining three cups of liquid.  When hot, add it to the pot, maintain a simmer, cover the pan and cook until the carrots are tender, about 20 minutes. Remove the thyme branch. Puree the soup. Taste for salt and season with pepper.

Simmer the diced carrots in boiling salted water for about 3 minutes, then drain.

Scatter the diced carrots plus the minced greens over the surface of the soup just before serving.

Mouse Nibbles and High Winds

Despite the wind, putting on a jacket, grabbing a fork and going outside was actually easier than driving to the store, not to mention a better choice than burning up fossil fuel for some Jerusalem artichokes and a leek.

Our miserable windy spring weather has begun. On Leap Day, winds from our area turned into tornadoes in the mid-west. Here they were merely fierce, cold and loud, bringing sand and dust on their breath and doing a number on the cottonwood trees, pruning the live limbs over the dead ones. It’s not much fun to go out in this weather, but in the interest of being frugal as well as being curious, I did. I couldn’t resist prowling around my beds to see what was there. I came back inside chilled, but with arms full— more hairy salsify roots, a few leeks, plenty of red skinned Walspinel Jerusalem artichokes and a few giant carrots, mostly white and pale yellow. I’m so amazed at how generous the garden has been given the neglect it’s endured since the fall. Plus it kindly stores my harvest for me, which is convenient since it won’t all fit (or last) in the refrigerator. And so I am grateful, too, and inspired to do better.

What’s interesting about cooking from a garden is that you just look at what you have and go from there.  Not that I don’t do that pretty much everyday regardless of where my food comes from, but the garden messes with your head in a different way than your well-mannered vegetables from the co-op do. It gives you a few salsify roots, maybe one burdock, a yellow carrot with mouse nibbles on it and a whole lot of white carrots. The leeks are too tough for the spring braised I’m hankering, but I’ve got to use them somehow. The bearded salsify I now regard as a bit of chore to deal—I see why it went out of favor— but there it is. (And a fresh package of seed is on the way!) I have one thin burdock root.  I wash the dirt off my collection, take the water outside for a peony, then stare at my harvest. Eventually a dish takes form.

In this case, it was a soup, which is always most forgiving when you’re faced with a bit of this and more of that. I thought it would go in one direction, but instead it went in two. I used the burdock, those red-skinned Jerusalem artichokes, the leeks, a few salsify roots, and some mushroom stock I had made from a pound of forgotten funghi, plus a cup of home-made chicken stock. When I got all the vegetables trimmed, sliced and into the pot, I was taken aback by their forms and hues. They were gorgeous, their earth tones subdued and subtle.

When I finished cooking the soup I was reluctant to puree it as intended, so I served the vegetables in their thin broth. That thinness was deceptive though, for the flavor from the roots was earthy and big and not too sweet. I added a pinch of truffle salt. I love that with weird roots. It was a light soup, good for the first course at dinner, with big surprising depth.

I pureed what was left, as I had intended in the first place. It was simple, beige and flecked with the skins of the sunchokes, but the flavors wandered around among the earthy, sweet but not too sweet natures of the roots. Truffle salt went on this one too.  No cream. Not only didn’t I have any, I didn’t want to dilute the flavor. No green, either, though sunflower sprouts would be good and right in the same family as the Jerusalem artichokes.  It looked dull, but then it surprised.  I did keep some vegetables intact plus added a few breadcrumbs for texture.

I want to give you a really worked out recipe, but what I have is more of an approach. I know I can’t ask someone to go out and look for a salsify root, after all, or assume they have one growing in their back yard. Your soup will be fine without it. But do try the burdock – it’s a good partner with those sun chokes. And don’t be afraid of a soup that doesn’t look like much. The drama is really in the flavors – except that the cook gets another bit of drama when she looks in the pot early on and sees all those beautiful, odd vegetables.

Jerusalem Artichoke, Burdock and Salsify Soup with Truffle Oil                    Serves 6

(These are more-or-less amounts, as they can be in a soup.)

1 1/2  tablespoons sunflower seed oil

1 or 2 leeks, thinly sliced, or an onion, diced into ½-inch pieces, about one cup

1 pound Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed and thinly sliced

1 small yellow-fleshed potato, peeled, quartered and sliced

1 white or yellow carrot, scrubbed and thinly sliced

1 burdock root, about 4 ounces peeled and sliced about 1/8-inch thick and covered immediately with water and a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice

1 salsify root, (should you have it) peeled, sliced in rounds and put in water with the burdock root

sea salt

41/2 cups, in all, chicken stock, mushroom stock, or water

1 tablespoon flour

Tuffle salt (optional)

Heat the oil in a soup pot and add the leek or onion, Jerusalem artichoke, potato and carrot. Drain the burdock and salsify and add them to the pot. Turn immediately to coat with the oil. Sprinkle over 1 teapoon sea salt and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.  Add the 1 cup of the stock, cover the pan, and cook gently for 10 minutes.

Remove the lid, sprinkle over the flour then stir it in to the vegetables. Pour in the rest of the stock, bring to a boil then simmer, partially covered. Check after 15 minutes, take a taste, and make sure the burdock is sufficiently tender. If not simmer 10 minute more, or until it is to your liking.

Either serve the broth with the vegetables and a pinch of truffle salt. Or puree the soup.

If choosing the latter route, you might have to add extra liquid, which could be any of those you’ve used so far, or milk or a little light cream.  Taste for salt, consider a little pepper, and serve with or without the truffle salt.