Miss T's Mystery House of Yarn & Horrors

What Did We Do on Labor Day?

 

 

 

 

Ahhh....sauce for the winter.

Green Chile Eggs

Glory, glory, hallelujah!  The Hatch green chile is here!

Friday was the Very Best Day of the Year at my grocery store.  The one day each year when green chiles arrive from Hatch, New Mexico.

Almost makes me cry, and not because the chiles are hot.  (Which they are, beautifully so.)  I used to live in the Mesilla Valley, about thirty miles from where these chiles are grown.  Best chiles on earth.  They look like Anaheims, but they’re a million times more flavorful, and they only grow in that particular part of New Mexico.  The whole valley is fragrant from the chiles this time of year.  Can you tell I miss it a wee bit?

It’s always a happy surprise when I see them in the store here -- the produce manager is lucky I don’t start dancing and singing, frankly.  This time, I quickly loaded up bags with about nine pounds of chiles.  Not much, really, once they’re roasted.

Roasting is simple, even if you’re not at the Hatch festival and don’t have access to one of the chile roasting guys.

Lay them out on a baking pan and put them under the broiler till they’re black on one side.  Flip and blacken the other side.  All there is to it.

Into freezer bags they go.



Now what, you ask?

Well, New Mexicans put green chile in everything.  Seriously.  Potato salad, mayo for sandwiches, burgers, stew...you name it, somewhere in the state of New Mexico there’s a recipe that includes chile.  Here's an easy one:  Miss T’s Green Chile Eggs.

Are those not the most beautiful eggs?  My friend Sete has an egg connection, and gets them from a farm once a month.  She hooked me up.  Thanks, Sete!

So.  Crack however many eggs you normally crack for scrambled eggs and whip them up with a little cream, about a tablespoon per egg.  Either half & half or heavy, depending on how decadent you’re feeling.  I was celebrating Chile Day, so heavy cream it was.

Put on gloves.  These chiles are not to be trifled with.  Peel off the blackened skin and chop the chile.  You’ll need maybe half of one.  The rest can go in the fridge for future chile adventures.  Smells incredible, doesn’t it?

Saute the chile in butter, and when it’s all nice and sizzly, turn the heat down.  Pour in the eggs, and dot them with cream cheese.

Slowly scramble.  Slowly!  Your husband should be tapping his foot in the dining room, wondering when the hell the eggs are going to be done -- that slow.  The cream cheese will melt and vanish into the eggs.  Yes, heavy cream and cream cheese, plus incredibly rich eggs from good old-fashioned bug-fed chickens.  Doesn’t get much more wicked than that.

Turn off the flame when the eggs are just this side of being done.  They’ll sit in the hot pan for a moment while you spread jelly on English muffins, and then they’ll be perfect.

Long live the Hatch green chiles!

The Iron Chefettes Sneak Up On You a Week Early

Allez cuisine!

Has desperation set in at Chez KnitThink?  I mean, Eva Peron aprons?  Dinner rolls dpn-ed to her head?  Are we supposed to be distracted from the food?

I, for one, will not be thrown off by an apron (cool as it is).  No, I shall fight the old-fashioned way, with good food and bad photography!  Think about it folks, Amy is now out of dead celebrity aprons.  Between now and the end of the CSA season, she’s going to have to face me on level ground, with spatulas, whisks and cookbooks.  And I am not without a few secret weapons of my own...

This week’s raw materials:  A Hungarian hot pepper, a Japanese eggplant, corn, a Jimmy Nardello pepper and an orange bell pepper, watermelon, onions, fennel, garlic, cucumbers, summer squash, tomatoes, red potatoes, salad mix, and cilantro.  Whew!

One new ground rule:  This week, and this week only (unless we change our minds), we’ll each be posting about only four recipes.  Because time is short.  There’s the State Fair to go to!  We have to save some room for greasy fried things on sticks!

On to the food.  First up, a way to use fennel that would make it sufficiently palatable to the M.E., who is not overly wild about its licorice flavor.  Yes, I’m back to winging it.  I sauteed the fennel and Mr. Jimmy Nardello the Pepper with lots of garlic.  About five cloves.  Added some thyme and a bit of dried fennel seed.  Then I boiled red potatoes, drained them and tossed them with white wine while they were still steaming hot.  Mixed them with the sneakily sauteed fennel, plus some Nicoise olives and a quick dressing of oil, white wine vinegar and grainy mustard, and got this:

Oh yes, I sprinkled it with grated Parmesan, too.  (Good thing I take photos, or I’d never remember what I’ve done!)  Big thumbs-up from the Not-Sure-About-Fennel Contingent.  Well-disguised fennel, and the salad was quite nice with some spicy pork tenderloin.  We’d both eat this again.

That was not my secret weapon.  It was delicious, but not of secret weapon caliber.  Read on.

I’ve been bummed about corn this year.  We just haven’t had any that’s been really good, and although I hate to say it, the corn we got in this box was not an improvement.  Very small ears, very pale kernels that didn’t have much flavor.  There are ways around these things, however.  Corn can be jazzed up.

I cut it off the cobs and fried it in a little butter and oil, with orange bell pepper and roasted poblanos.  Spiced it up and added a bit of heavy cream, cilantro, and topped it off with some lovely brown-sugar cured trout.

'Twas splendid, despite the corn.

That wasn’t the secret weapon, either.

As you may have noticed, there was summer squash again in this week’s box.  I do love summer squash, and I’ve been trying to fix it in different ways so that, despite my affection for it, the dreaded Summer Squash Fatigue Syndrome (SSFS) doesn’t set in.  This week, summer squash goes Japanese!

When I was a kid, my dad grew pattypan the size of Frisbees.  My mom would slice them, dip them in egg and flour, fry them, and then we’d season them with soy sauce.  Very tempura-like, and I love it that way.  So I decided to take it one step further:  tendon.  No, not that stringy stuff inside your arms and legs.  Tendon is a Japanese rice bowl dish, and if I ever find myself in a little Japanese joint around lunchtime, it’s my favorite thing to order.

We sort of used the recipe I linked above, but weren’t in the mood for dragging out the deep fryer, so the M.E. pan-fried the squash, as well as some chicken and green pepper.  We piled that on top of rice, and sauced it with this, which is incredibly easy to make if you start with dashi no moto, which is basically a fish teabag.

Here's the sauce:

 

The tendon:

I can’t say the word yum emphatically enough.  Lordy, do I ever wish I could eat this every day.  Alas, I cannot -- it would be the death of both me and my kitchen.  A girl can dream, though.

That still wasn’t my secret weapon. 

I’m getting to it now, though.  Four dishes, remember?  My last creation for this week captures the essence of summer in a pure, yet unique way.  I prepared for it weeks ahead of time by ordering special materials and tools on the internet.  Any guesses?  Didn’t you wonder why, instead of being tormented with a vegetable he doesn’t want, the Chairman is sitting nicely in front of a piece of cheese?

See, the essence of summer is tomatoes, and there’s really no way to improve on a great summer tomato.  The best thing you can do is set it off with a little salt and, say, some good bread and a slice or two of mozzarella.

So I made mozzarella.  Yeah, even though I didn’t have an Evita apron to catch the splashing whey, I. Made. Cheese.

Super-secret cheesemaking supplies:

 

Highly necessary cheesemaking book, acquired at a flea market last year for $2.  By the same author (and cheese equipment supplier), recipe for 30-Minute Mozzarella.

Those things, plus a gallon of organic milk and a microwave, will result in cheese.  My photos aren’t the greatest, because the thing about making cheese is that you have to pay attention and you can’t stop to take pictures.  But despite the sketchy documentation, this was one of the most fun things I’ve ever made. 

You add citric acid and lipase to the milk, and heat it until it starts to curdle.  That’s a special dairy thermometer, and it has to be watched very closely.

 

Then add rennet and stir, and let it sit until the curds break more or less cleanly when you stab them with a knife.

You pour off the whey.  Boy, was there a lot of whey.  Most of a gallon of milk is whey!  Who knew?  It was determined that the M.E. would be less of a hazard doing this step than I would, and he did do an excellent job of making sure that the entire kitchen floor was not covered in whey. 

I, however, got to do the very best part.  Wheeee!  This was entirely too much fun.  I could have kept doing it all day.

The reason for the rubber gloves is that the cheese is hot--see, after the whey removal, you microwave it.  Then you knead the clay cheese and stretch it and smush it around until it’s whey-free and all nice and smooth and shiny.  Microwave it again and repeat that process a couple of times, and voila:

 

That.  From a gallon of milk.

Fresh mozzarella is best eaten right away, so we cut bread and sliced up an heirloom tomato and made a quick salad with our CSA’s fabulous greens and some bacon...

 

…and that was dinner.  Truly one of the most delightful summer dinners ever, and it even came with its own show.  (I may have been doing a little dancing while I kneaded the cheese.  I told you it was fun.)  The mozzarella had wonderful flavor, and was a great foil for the tomatoes.  Simple, elegant and happy.  No question, I’m making this again, and I can’t wait to try homemade mozzarella on a homemade pizza.

Well then.  One secret weapon has been launched from each side.  Bodies everywhere!  Kitchens in flaming ruins!  Neighbors running for cover!  Dogs licking the floors!  (Okay, so dogs are always licking the floors.) 

We’ve each taken a hit....what will the next battle bring?   

Friday Food Special Monday Edition: Pensacola Gaspachee Salad

This is a very interesting recipe, which I ran across in a charming new cookbook, Endangered Recipes, by Lari Robling.

The idea behind the book is that the author believes deeply in the importance of family recipes, and the memories they evoke.  She didn’t want wonderful, old-school comfort recipes to be lost, and set out to collect her favorites.  As one who treasures old family recipes, I love this idea.  You just can’t have too many books of this sort, because each one brings an entirely different perspective to the table.  There are good things in Endangered Recipes, many of them familiar:  Welsh Rarebit, Boston Baked Beans, Green Goddess Dressing, Peach Ice Cream. 

I bypassed all those, of course, when deciding upon a recipe to test.  Instead I was drawn to the unusual, the recipes I’d never heard of before.  Perhaps the most obscure of them was the Pensacola Gaspachee Salad.  The name was irresistible, and it had one very strange thing in its list of ingredients.  I kept flipping back to that page, over and over.  How could I possibly make anything else?

The strange ingredient is Crown Pilot crackers.  In the dressing.  Now, unfortunately, just after this book came out, Nabisco took Crown Pilots off the market.  For the second time.  It’s quite the cracker drama.  I realized that the Crown Pilot cracker was simply a commercial version of hardtack, and that truly sealed the deal:  an opportunity to make not one, but two unusual recipes!  Surely, I figured, I could make hardtack.

In fact, it’s ridiculously easy.  The recipe I used is here (scroll down).

You mix flour, water, salt and a wee bit of shortening.  A bread whisk works well for this.

 

Mash it onto an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for an hour.

 

Then you’re supposed to take it out of the oven, cut it into squares, poke holes in it, and flip it over.  Poking holes in things is always amusing, but this stuff was poke-resistant.  Too hard already.  It just sort of split in a very uncooperative manner.

 

So I abandoned the poking, turned the hardtack over, and put it back in the oven for half an hour.  Et voila...

 

Several days later (one of the principal virtues of hardtack is that it stays pretty much the same, no matter how long it sits around, thus why sailors could travel around with barrels of the stuff way back when)  I made the salad.

The recipe commences with soaking hardtack in water for at least an hour, until it’s very soft. How on earth did anybody think this up?

I did the best I could in my attempt to create a proper bowl of cracker mush.  But an hour’s soaking was not enough, and dinnertime loomed.  So I went ahead and used the partial mush, which still had chewy bits of hardtack in it.  Actually, that turned out to be a good thing.  Read on...

You mix the hardtack with the rest of the dressing ingredients, which include mayonaise and cider vinegar.  I was still wondering how the original cook dreamed this up.  And that name.  It sounded so gazpacho-ish.  I had to do a little research.

Google Books had a page from Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History, by John Egerton and Ann Bleidt Egerton, online.  According to the authors, there’s a heavy Spanish influence around Pensacola, Florida, which somehow resulted in gazpacho being transformed into a salad.  Tomatoes, cucumber, why do all that pureeing?  Just eat it with a fork.  Evidently there’s a bakery in Pensacola that bakes hardtack solely to satisfy the needs of folks who want to make this salad.  Could it really be that good?  Or is it one of those things you only like if you grew up eating it?

And then it hit me.  Gaspachee is not only a version of gazpacho created in a state which loves words that end in “ee,” it’s also a strange Florida version of a Mediterranean bread salad!  Maybe it would be okay.

On I went.  I cut up cucumber, celery, onion, tomato and green bell pepper.

 

I mixed the somewhat lumpy dressing with the vegetables, and we ate the salad with some beautiful fried catfish.

What was the verdict?  Well, it was fantastic.  Seriously.  If you’re a regular reader of my food posts, you know that my wonderful husband, the M.E., is not a big fan of salads.  He could go along for months without eating one, and never feel deprived. 

He had seconds.

Seriously, folks, you have to make this.  It really was that good.  Oddly, the chewy bits of hardtack were terrific.  I’ll make it that way again next time -- my Midwestern version of the Florida tradition -- and there will indeed be a next time.  I’m grateful to Ms. Robling for introducing me to this marvelous recipe and bit of Americana with the enticing description in her book. 

I’ll have to move fast to get another salad made before the hardtack’s gone, though.  Guess who thinks it’s the best treat ever?

 

The Iron Chefettes Ride Again....So Soon!

Allez cuisine!

This box did keep me busy.  Have a look:

 

A hot banana pepper, corn, collards, onions, garlic, cukes, summer squash, cherry tomatoes, green and purple beans, salad mix, and basil.  Plus there were the blueberries that Amy mentioned last week, and tomatoes.  We both bought them, so they count.

Let’s get the blueberries taken care of right away, since Amy wrote about hers last week.  Okay, so I’m slow.  But I made pie!

I have to say, pie scares me.  I’m not afraid of much in the kitchen, but I’m afraid of pie.  See, my mom makes the best pie crust I’ve ever had.  Anywhere.  And if you knew the two of us, you’d know that I’m not just saying that because she’s my mom.  We’re notoriously honest with each other--if one of us makes something crappy, the other one will say so.  No hard feelings, we’re just that way.  So when I say she makes the best, most tender, flakiest crust in the world, I’m not kidding.  Me?  I’m terrible at it.  I work the dough too long.  Can’t seem to not work it too long, no matter how hard I try, and it’s never right.

Looks so innocent, doesn’t it?  But it’s pure evil.  Out to get me.  Oh, I know what Amy’s saying.  Something along the lines of, “I told you baking was bad.”  But it’s not all baking.  I’m fine with baking anything but pie.  Which, alas, is also the baked thing that I love most.

This time, I didn’t use the vodka crust.  I really wanted to try it the old-fashioned way and see if I could finally get it right.  Guess what?  I couldn't.

 

It doesn’t look as if anything’s wrong, but the crust was slightly tough.  Not tender and flaky and perfect.

 
Mom made note of the fact.  I did, too.  We agreed that I need more practice.  “One pie a month,” she said.  I wondered who was going to buy me bigger clothes after I eat all this pie.  We also agreed that even though the crust wasn’t perfect, it was still pie.  Blueberry pie.  Which was gone in no time, because even an imperfect blueberry pie, if it is homemade, is a lovely thing.  (Although, between you and me, I’m still wishing I could get the crust right.)

 

Oh, and those blueberries were amazing.  Sweetest ones I've ever had.  I’m dying for more.

We sprinkled the sweet corn with chile and lime juice, and ate it with black bean and chorizo tortas.

Some of that gorgeous lettuce, and the tomatoes, went into BLTs.  I adore BLTs.  They are one of the main justifications for the existence of summer, in my book, and I have them as often as possible while I can.

 

One of the big favorites this week was definitely the Zucchini Ribbon Pasta, which Laura wrote up in the CSA newsletter.  You can also find the recipe here.  The M.E. was a bit worried when I made this, thinking it was going to be some treacherously bland vegetarian thing, but the recipe is somehow far more than the sum of its parts.  It’s truly fabulous, and he gave it a big thumbs-up.  I’m likely to make this again before the summer is over.

Then -- oh joy and rapture! -- there were collard greens.  The majority culture around here is just starting to catch on to how good these are, but I’ve been crazy about them since I was a little girl, and I can’t have collards too often.  I wanted to try something different this time, and I kept thinking about shrimp and white beans.  Don’t they sound like they’d be good with collards? 

I admit, I’ve been winging the majority of these CSA recipes, just throwing in whatever seems to work.  In an effort to make better use of my cookbooks this week, I took the brilliant Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s The Italian Country Table down from the shelf.  Lo and behold, she knew what I was thinking.  (Mysteriously, she often does.  But that’s another story.)  I used her recipe for Spaghettini with Shrimp, Chickpeas and Young Greens as a starting point, and was happy that I did.  Okay, I left out the pasta, changed the can of chickpeas to a cannellini beans, and changed the mix of salad greens, dandelion greens and curly endive to collards.  But otherwise I followed the Gospel of Lynne.  Pretty much. 

I sauteed onions, peppers, and black olives.

Added the greens, earlier in the process than she does, because the collards were past the baby stage and needed more cooking time.

In went the beans.

And shrimp.  And there it was, a scrumptious dish, just what I wanted.

(It’s still cooking in that last photo, so if you think the shrimp doesn’t look done, you’re right.)  There were a few other details, of course, but I can’t remember them.  So get a copy of the book.  It’s well worth having if you like authentic Italian food.

Told you this was a busy week.  But wait!  There’s more!  I had to do something with the summer squash, something entirely different.  And one thing we really, really love is paella. 

I found the perfect recipe in Penelope Casas’s book, Paella!  This is pretty much the book to have if you want to make paella.  I’ll warn you, it takes a lot of prep.

 

But honestly, I love making it.  Paella is fun, and it’s really a treat.  It’s one of my favorite things to make when we have dinner guests, despite the fact that it requires so much last-minute time in the kitchen.  People always wonder why I’ve disappeared for so long during what should be cocktail hour...until they taste the paella.  Then they get it.  (They really get it when they see the mess in the kitchen afterwards.)

Conveniently, Ms. Casas had a recipe for Green and Yellow Squash Paella with Pesto.  It used the aforementioned summer squash and zucchini, basil, and a hot pepper (perfect use for that banana pepper).

 

It was really delicious despite, as noted by the M.E., the absence of any form of pork products.  I promised to sneak in a little sausage next time.

I made a Vietnamese chicken salad which was a perfect vehicle for some of those great cucumbers.  Yum.  I did use a recipe.  From, um, somewhere.  Don’t remember where I put it at the moment.

 

I sauteed green and purple beans (which all wind up green in the end) with cashews, shallots and sherry vinegar.  Yum again.  Note the pork chop in the background.

I made chicken and pinto bean burritos...

...which had nothing whatsoever to do with the CSA box, but they went along with this broccoli:

I know.  It just looks like slightly scorched broccoli.  But it’s actually Grilled Broccoli with Clary’s Exquisitely Wicked Marinade, from Crescent Dragonwagon’s brilliant doorstopper of a cookbook, Passionate Vegetarian.

And it is indeed exquisitely wicked.  You’ve never had broccoli like this.  Lime, adobo seasoning (which you don’t have to search for in a million stores--Google it and mix up your own), pineapple juice, rum and some other stuff.  It’s such a good marinade, I think I’ll try it with some other things, too.  Like pork.  Heh.

I love leftover green beans for lunch, so I made a bean salad with chicken, water chestnuts, walnuts, sesame oil and soy sauce.  There were regular old lunchtime lettuce salads, too, but I didn’t photograph them.

Oh, and I made a big container of refrigerator pickles with most of the cukes.  From this recipe, which is very good and is also surprisingly low in salt.

You’re probably worn out by now.  I sure am.  And I used a lot of actual recipes written by actual other people this time, so I’m feeling virtuous.  But that wasn’t it.  There was one more thing.  I made an odd and special recipe, one of our favorites this week, which was so interesting that it’s deserving of its very own post.  Come back on Monday -- yes, Monday! -- and I’ll tell you all about it.  I’m sure this is probably breaking some rule and Amy’s Dead Chairman will let me know about it, but what the hell.  I’m doing it anyway.

The Iron Chefettes Are Back!

Allez cuisine!

Why is the Chairman hiding behind an eggplant?  It was a difficult couple of weeks, that’s why, and he’s worried I’m going to lose.  Oh, there was plenty of good stuff to work with in this box.

So much, it wouldn’t fit into a single photograph.

But there was one thing which figured more prominently in my cooking than any other ingredient last week.

Sigh.  The M.E. and I both had colds.  His was waning, mine was at its worst.  And that meant I had no tastebuds.

I made a salad with red potatoes, green beans and a mix of herbs to go with corn and bratwurst.

I couldn’t taste the herbs at all, but the M.E. said it was delicious.  The first corn of the season, by the way, was quite disappointing.  Probably picked too soon.  That dastardly Corn Lady lied when she told me it had good flavor.  Last time I buy from her--I like it when sellers are straight with me. 

I jazzed up the rest of the corn by sauteeing it with chile powder and lime, and put it on a salad with the wonderful mixed greens from our CSA box.  Much better that way.  Quite good, in fact.

Last Sunday was pizza night, and we tried a variation of the recipe for kale pizza from the CSA newsletter.  We added sauce and some Italian sausage, and it was very good.  The cherry tomatoes really gave it a nice punch.  Sweet as candy.  If you try this, make sure the kale is mostly underneath the cheese, so it doesn’t get crispy. 

Simple things, clearly, were working best with my disabled tastebuds.  Like a plain roast chicken, with potatoes, green beans, and the sweetest onions ever -- fresh ones from the CSA box.

It really is hard to beat a roast chicken.

A nice, simple steak with a salad also hit the spot.  This required no imagination whatsoever.  It was blatantly, intentionally uninspired, and it was absolutely perfect:  mixed greens with cucumber, homemade croutons, and those amazing cherry tomatoes.

And that’s the thing about good summer produce.  It’s usually best unadorned, even if you don’t have a cold.  Nevertheless, I had to try.  I mean, it’s not going to be a terribly interesting competition if all we’re doing is boiling vegetables or eating them raw.  So I thought I’d do something fun with the summer squash.

Fun at Casa Mystery often begins with bacon.

Grilling is fun, too, even the inside kind.  Like my purty new grill pan?  Mom decided she had one grill pan too many, and gave me her Le Creuset.  And a matching casserole.  And matching trivet.  She gets in these moods sometimes, and there's nothing you can do to stop her.

 

While the squash was grilling, I browned some onions and garlic.  This was all being made up as I went along, of course, with no idea exactly where it was going to wind up.

Tomato.  It needed tomato.  In went a can of diced tomatoes, with all their liquid.

At this point, things seemed to be veering in an Italian direction.  That, however, was not my mood.  I wanted fun!  Drama!  Something unusual!  Knowing that it is at least occasionally possible to find drama in the freezer, I rooted around....and came up with treasure.

Egyptian baby okra.  Aren’t they the cutest things?  Most of them are no bigger than the tip of my pinkie finger, and they’re so good.

The sauce needed some flavor, so I went straight for the big gun.  Ras al hanout.  You may remember I made some for the Moroccan Cubanos awhile back.  Okay, so you probably don’t remember that.  But I not only remembered, I found it in my spice cupboard and added a couple of teaspoons to the pan.

When the squash was done, I cut it up and put it in the sauce.  Added the okra -- and the bacon -- when it was about fifteen minutes away from being done.  See, that’s the trick with okra.  It only gets slimy if you overcook it.  It behaves very nicely when given only a few minutes to cook and think about its fate.

And....success!  We really liked this.  I’d add a bit more Ras al hanout next time, and the M.E. wanted more bacon (which is normal), but other than that it was a definite keeper.

I made chorizo hash, with fingerling potatoes, green beans and chipotle peppers.  Yum.

And eggplant curry, once the Chairman was done cowering behind the eggplant.  The recipe was from this book.  Thai curry, with green curry paste, coconut milk, beef and basil.  I love Thai curries.  They’re fun, quick, and super easy.  This one was very good, although I’d do a couple things differently next time.  First of all, eggplant should not be in green curry.  No matter how good it tastes, there’s no color, and it looks like a plate of dirty dishwater. 

 

Ugly, isn't it?  Definitely red curry next time.  I would also sweat the eggplant in a separate pan before adding it to the rest, because it threw off so much water that it diluted the sauce.

So, what were the favorites?  I have no idea.  We were in agreement that everything was good (except that stupid corn), but nothing stood out as being spectacular.  I’d probably pick the roast chicken menu if pressed, and it’s not like I haven’t made that about ‘leventy squillion times. 

Sigh. I hope next week goes better.  In the meantime, anybody got an eggplant I can hide behind? 

The Iron Chefettes...

....will be back next week.  Amy sums it up very well, so hop on over to her blog and read about why we’re not posting recipes today.  (See, this was my evil plan:  Be slow to post, and then all I’d have to do was link rather than think up a clever explanation.  Ha!)

But what’s all this about a Dead Chairman making a special appearance?  My Chairman ain’t afraid of no Dead Chairman.  My Chairman rolls in dead things.  Really.  He did it just this week.  I’ll spare you the details.

Best. Lunch. Ever.

It’s hard to find bad food in Chicago.  There must be some, but after four or five trips to the city, we’ve yet to locate it.  Even in a good-food-city, some things stand out. 

We had tried several times, on different visits, to get into Rick Bayless’s Frontera Grill.  I’ve loved his cookbooks and perspective on Mexican cuisine (which is one of my top three favorites) for ages, and wanted to try the restaurant.  But even when we called more than a month ahead, getting a dinner reservation proved to be impossible.*

That, however, was during the boom, when everybody at least thought they had money for expensive restaurants all the time.  When we discovered that Frontera was only five blocks from our hotel, we crossed our fingers that perhaps the recession might be on our side, and trotted on down just as they were opening for lunch.

There was a line half a block long outside, waiting for the door to open.

If the recession was hitting Chicago, it missed Frontera.  Nevertheless, we got in.  (The M.E. snuck a photo with his iPhone to prove it.  I scrubbed out the face of the notorious Sandal Sock Woman, so that I can talk about her footwear.  White athletic socks.  With big ugly sandals.  In a very, very cute restaurant.  Tsk.)  Good thing we arrived right when they opened, because within half an hour, the place was completely slammed.

After that, no more pictures.  Sorry.  The food was too amazing.  We just wanted to eat it, not photograph it. 

There was a little cup of spicy peanuts and pumpkinseeds to munch while we decided what to eat.

There were margaritas -- one with some kind of special tequila I can’t remember, the other with cucumber.  Yes, cucumber!  It was fabulous.

There was a trio of ceviches served in tiny martini glasses:  Hawaiian sunfish, shrimp and calamari, tuna.  Impossibly good, all of them.  (But the sunfish was my favorite.)  Neither of us had ever had ceviche this good, anywhere.

I could have eaten ceviche all afternoon, but we moved on to the main course instead.  The M.E. had goat enchiladas in an incredibly delicious, complex sauce, with black beans and cute little handmade tortillas.  I had (sustainably caught) swordfish in a chile-cream sauce with red rice and some sort of delightful little greens.  It was the most buttery, rich fish you can imagine.  Rich and fatty like a well-marbled steak.

We had no room for dessert, even though a goat’s milk cajeta ice cream was on the menu.  Dang it.

Cute place with tons of wonderful Mexican folk art on the walls; perfect service by a smart, friendly waitress; astonishingly good food which was worth every cent.....I have to say, more than a few of the celebrity chefs who are all over the TV these days are full of hot air and not paying much attention to their restaurants, but Rick Bayless is obviously the real deal.  We’ve been to some great restaurants, and Frontera has won a slot on our short list of The Best of the Best.

I so want dessert next time.  I swear, I won’t eat for a week before or after.

*Typepad is being a buggy little snot about font sizes today!

The Iron Chefettes, CSA Edition: Battle Peas, Greens & Summer Squash

Allez cuisine!

Clearly, the Chairman wanted nothing to do with anybody’s scallions.  That’s okay, though, since there were no scallions in our boxes this week.  The loot:  baby fennel, sage, oregano, purple carrots, mesclun mix, pea shoots, radishes, cucumbers, baby summer squash, kale, sugar snap peas, green leaf lettuce.

I’ve had a couple of pretty good weeks, so all along I’ve been expecting the other shoe to drop.  As in Amy’s shoe, right on my head.  Will this be the week?  The M.E. and I have been cooking for two households lately, and that’s a lot even for us.  Burnout could hit at any second, and if you think that a bit of luck with a salad and a fruit tart have made me the least bit confident about the whole thing, well, you’ve been smoking beet skins.

So.  Here goes nothing.

I made salads, of course.  Here’s one with mesclun, sunflower sprouts, toasted pecans, dried cranberries and a hard-boiled egg:

 

Probably the best salad of the week was this one:

Mesclun again, plus pea shoots, cucumber, cute little pink currants, homemade croutons and a homemade yogurt dressing.  I did a variant on it one day which also included sunflower sprouts and bacon.

Those little currants were so adorable and good.  Amy bought some, too, and threatened to just sit down and eat them all without trying a recipe.  I will admit that we did consume some of them in such a wanton manner.  With good cheeses and crackers and some hard cider, while relaxing on the deck.  (As much as you can relax on our deck, what with the Chairman demanding that tennis balls be thrown for him continuously.)

They were kind of like champagne grapes, in that setting.  (The currants.  Not the tennis balls.  Even though the tennis balls were pink, too.)  The alert among you may recognize that plate as vintage Hellerware.

We had some really excellent fried trout (kudos to the M.E. for filleting it, which was no easy feat!), with sauteed sugar snap peas and baby red potatoes with scallions. 

Very yummy.  Want more trout.  The recipe is sort of here, except that we didn’t cook the trout like that at all.  So it’s really just the recipes for the vegetables, which were scrumptious.

Baby summer squash are so cute.  It’s hard to decide whether to cook them, or just sit around and beep them on their noses.

Of course I cooked them.  I'm such a meanie.

They’re cute sliced and lined up in rows in the grill pan, too.

And they were incredibly good in tacos, with chorizo, chipotle peppers, caramelized onions, avocado and queso (with mango salsa on the side).  That was one of our favorites this week.  No recipe, sorry--I made this up on the fly and don’t quite remember what I did.  And now that I think about it, I’d have to say this was a tie with the fried trout, because I am still thinking about that trout.  If that makes for three favorites, so be it.

Baby purple carrots are cute, too.  (But not quite as cute as squash.)

Okay, carrots, cute as they are, are not my best thing.  I’m fine with them in things -- stews, soups, etc. -- and I like them raw.  But I never have been able to stand just a pile of cooked carrots on their own, even if they’re really good carrots.  Which these were.  So one of my challenges this summer is going to be figuring out some new ways to use them. 

But I did nothing of the sort.  Nope.  No challenge for me.  Into the soup pot they went (most of them), for minestrone.

See, new and challenging were not my things this week.  I say that knowing that Amy’s shoe is hovering right above my head this very minute.  And I say it defiantly, because I gave in to being stressed out and overwhelmed, and I used my CSA kale to make an old favorite.  A recipe I’ve made countless times.  Countless.

Yes, folks, I have copped out. 

And what a delicious cop-out it was.  County Kerry Kale, from Bert Greene’s splendid book, Greene on Greens.

Quite possibly one of the best things in the world.  Kale.  Potatoes.  Bacon.  Happy, happy.  Don't care that it's not new and imaginative.  So there.

The pea shoots were more of an experiment and, frankly, one I didn’t understand.



We had a few in a salad, raw, and they were just fine.  I stir fried the rest and simmered them in chicken broth with udon, pork tenderloin, and sugar snaps.

The combination had good flavor, and the sugar snaps were perfect.  But the pea shoots?  Tough.  So tough we both wound up fishing them out and leaving them uneaten.  I don’t know why they’d be okay raw but tough cooked, but this was my first time with pea shoots.  Perhaps there’s a trick to them.  (Perhaps I’d better figure it out before next year’s pea shoots arrive.) 

Is it the Curse of Green Things Which Resemble String?  You may recall that Amy had difficulty with tough garlic scapes last time, and I had a few issues with them as well.  Anybody know what the deal is with pea shoots?

Well, the parade of peas and noodles went on.  In an effort to use up some stuff from the fridge, I made a version of our old comfort food favorite, pasta with ham and peas.  With sugar snaps and bacon instead.


You know, some things can’t be fiddled with.  It was good, but despite our deep love of bacon, we discovered that ham is actually better in this recipe.

Our top favorite this week was not without noodles, either.  Cucumbers, sunflower sprouts, carrots (raw, marinated in rice vinegar), snow peas, cilantro, peanuts, rice noodles and leftover steak made for one seriously kick-ass salad. 

The dressing (for two servings): 

1/6 c. sugar
2 1/2 Tbsp. rice vinegar
1 Tbsp. fish sauce
1 tsp. Chinese chili-garlic sauce

 

This was amazing.  Truly.  I’d eat it again next week if I could.  I’d eat it again tonight if I could.  Maybe, just maybe, this will allow me to avoid the specter of Amy’s shoe.  And, well, I do still have a cuter Chairman, no matter what she says.  A proper Chairman is not covered with tattoos.

The Iron Chefettes: Battle Greens & Berries!

Allez cuisine!

Another whirlwind week of food.  In competition this week:  Red leaf lettuce, spinach, kohlrabi, baby beets, strawberries, garlic scapes and cucumbers.  It was a whirlwind week in other ways, too, so I forgot to take a picture of all the goodies in their pre-cooked state.  (But they were pretty.)  I can’t say I was at the top of my game this week, because I was torn in too many directions and more than a bit stressed out, but we still ate some wonderful things.  So, what did I make?

Well, the lettuce went into lots of sandwiches and salads.  Nothing particularly exciting, but yummy.  Strawberries are exciting, though, when they’re organic and tiny and sweet.  Those monster factory berries from California that are nearly the size of my fist?  Blech.  But these.

I mixed some of them with blackberries and macerated them with a little sugar and Grand Marnier. 

Scrumptious.  I’ll tell you about the other berry thing I made a bit later.  It's worth waiting for. 

I made Cucumbers in Black Vinegar to go along with a pork and spinach stir-fry.  Not bad.  Black vinegar is sort of the Chinese version of balsamic.  It has a deep, rich sweetness.  I think I’d jazz the recipe up just a bit next time, though.  It could have used a tiny bit more punch.

The pork and spinach dish was my own spontaneous invention, and we liked it.  It was almost one of our favorites for the week.

Lots of scallions, hot little Thai bird chiles, soba noodles....yum.  The spinach was wonderful, with a bright, fresh flavor that really stood out.

Garlic scapes are funny, curly things.  They’re the flower stems of the plant.  Removing them forces the plant to put more energy into making garlic bulbs, and less into showing off with flowers.  At some point, some smart person discovered they were good to eat. 



We put some on a pizza, which was similar to another recent pizza, and quite yummy.  Scapes have a mild garlic flavor, and were great in a pasta dish with anchovies and broccoli.  The recipe called for regular garlic, but it was easy to substitute scapes.  Delicious.  If you make this, spend a few cents extra and get the best anchovies you can find -- it will make a difference.

Kohlrabi.  I shall confess right here, to all of you.  I’d never tried it before.  It’s that funky, alien-looking thing most of us walk past in the grocery store.  You really don’t see many recipes for kohlrabi; I found very few even when I scoured my vegetarian cookbooks.  (Don’t let vegetarians fool you -- the ones I’ve met aren’t any more well-schooled in unusual vegetables than meatatarians are.  The most notorious and strident vegetarian I’ve ever known, in fact, didn’t even like very many vegetables.)  For example, Deborah Madison’s massive reference, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, only has two basic recipes for it.  That lack of P.R. on kohlrabi’s part sort of led me to think it wasn’t particularly good.  But further digging revealed that kohlrabi can be used raw as well as cooked, and that it’s better than its press.  

Having learned that you can use both the bulb and the leaves, I set to fiddling with it.  I cooked the leaves much as I do any other dark, leafy green, with a quick saute in hot oil, followed by simmering in liquid -- in this case, a little dry sherry.  I finished it with soy sauce and sesame oil.  You can see a tiny pile of it hiding behind some orange teriyaki chicken wings that the M.E. made.

Not bad.  A bit chewier than collards or kale, but I’d try it again and see if I can come up with the right treatment.  The main part of the kohlrabi turned out to have a nice, mild flavor, and worked very well in an impromptu Asian slaw.

Rice vinegar, sugar, salt, toasted black sesame seeds.  That’s it.  Yum.  I’m converted.  I’ll definitely cook with kohlrabi again.

All right now, let’s get down to it.  The week’s winners.  The first one will surprise you; it surprised me.  Beet greens.  I’m wishy-washy on beets.  I usually enjoy them while I’m eating them, but I don’t love them enough to ever crave them or go out of my way for them.  I could go beet-free for years and never think I was missing something.  I’d never tried the greens, however.  Why, I don’t know.  I’m such a greens girl, though, I might be tempted to buy beets just for the tops, now that I’ve tried them.  They’re sort of Swiss chardy, and really delicious.

I tried this recipe.  My only modification was that I snuck in more bacon than it called for, just cuz.  Who can blame me for that?  It was fabulous.

Sharing the plate there is some murderously good catfish the M.E. dipped in cornmeal and fried.  This was one of our favorite dinners last week, the sort of dinner that you finish and immediately wish you could eat it all over again.  I’m drooling just writing about it.

The other favorite was dessert.  I had enough strawberries to make a tart, and who can resist making a strawberry tart when the opportunity presents itself?

You make a crust (which is easy), and brush it with melted currant jelly.

Fill it with pastry cream.  I adore pastry cream.  I could make a vat of it and grab a spoon and go running down the street with it.

Top with with berries and brush them with more currant jelly.  If you want the recipe, it’s in Marion Cunningham’s The Fannie Farmer Baking Book, which is absolutely indispensible if you’re going to bake anything, ever.  Buy it.  Find a used copy.  Or at least check it out of the library.  If it can be baked, this woman knows the best way to do it.

Voila.

Yeah, it was that good.

Okay, Amy, whatcha got?