Strawberries: Tasting summer in winter

Fresh strawberries bring a needed taste of summer to a long winter, with a spicy, versatile salsa and a simply stellar dessert. Recipes below.

An update: In writing this post, I started to talk about food and carbon footprints, then decided to just celebrate strawberries in winter. Reader T.W. Barritt gave me a gentle nudge to reconsider the issue. So I’ve added an update at the end of the post. Probably opening a real can of worms here, but what can you do?

One morning recently I stopped at the grocery store on the way to work to pick up a couple of things for lunch. On my way through the produce section, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the scent of strawberries. It was the smell of summer. And with the winter we’ve been having in Chicago this year—it has snowed 35 days so far, some kind of record—summer is what I dearly needed to smell. And to taste.

Granted, you can often find at least a few strawberries in the store, even in winter. Often, though, they’re blond and bland. Or else they cost the Earth—this time of year, five bucks a pound is not out of the question. But this was a big, generous display of one-pound, clear plastic boxes, stacked high and smelling like a hot August day. And every bit as beautiful as the red, ripe berries themselves was a sign saying $1.99.

I took my time at the display, carefully picking a box that had the reddest, most beautiful berries without the telltale smooshed ones in the bottom that said this batch was past just ripe. At the checkout, the cashier suddenly picked up the box of strawberries and held it near her face, eyes closed, inhaling deeply, a startlingly intimate act with someone else’s purchase. But such was the power of the smell of those luscious berries on a winter morning.

The scent continued to exert its power, filling my office as I tried to concentrate on my work. By lunch, I had scarfed down half a dozen of these fat, juicy beauties, and over lunch, I hunted online for recipes to make the most of the rest of the strawberries, assuming they made it home.

What I found made the most of them indeed—a light, sophisticated dessert with exactly four ingredients. If you’re not ready for dessert yet, scroll on down to a versatile spicy fruit salsa that goes with salmon, chicken, chops and more. Continue reading “Strawberries: Tasting summer in winter”

Mushrooms: In praise of the basic button

The humble button mushroom packs as many or more antioxidants than more expensive varieties. And with a few simple ingredients, it packs amazing flavor too. A pair of recipes below.

After weeks of meat and fish, it’s time for vegetables to take center stage with another in the series of A Little Something on the Side.

We all remember the rotary phone, right? Before the advent of the touchtone phone, though, the retroactively dubbed rotary phone was just “the phone.”

And not so long ago in most American supermarkets and kitchens, humble button mushrooms were just mushrooms. Unless you were one of those people who trekked out into the woods collecting wild mushrooms [and in doing so, inspiring countless articles about the deadly dangers of toadstools], button mushrooms were pretty much the only game in town.

Now, between fresh and dried varieties, we have an embarrassment of mushroom riches at our fingertips. The portobello, once exotic and hard to find, is now almost boringly available in most stores. Shiitake, crimini, oyster, porcini, chanterelle, morel and a dazzling array of other fungi are increasingly finding their way onto store shelves and into our culinary hearts. Just this past weekend, I found enoki mushrooms, those slender, almost alien-being looking Japanese beauties, shrink-wrapped and sharing shelf space with portobello caps and pre-sliced “baby bellas” [they’re just crimini mushrooms, people—don’t get all wound up] in my neighborhood grocery store.

With competition like this, it’s easy for dependable old button mushrooms to get kicked to the curb, to be seen as somehow less wonderful than their more exotic, more expensive brethren.

Not so fast. Turns out button mushrooms have plenty going on, especially in the health department. According to a recent article in ScienceDaily [sent to me by fellow Internet magpie Carolyn—the magpie motto: “Ooooh, here’s another shiny link!”], “The humble white button mushroom [Agaricus bisporus] has as much, and in some cases, more anti-oxidant properties than more expensive varieties.” Who knew? For that matter, who knew that mushrooms even contained antioxidants, let alone that button mushrooms were particularly rich in them?

Which reminds me of a commentary I heard on American Public Media’s Marketplace last week. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, says that despite the growing cacophony of health claims from processed, packaged foods, the healthiest foods are still to be found in the produce section. “In fact,” Pollan states, “The more processed the food, the less nutritious it typically is. Yet it’s the processed food makers who have the marketing budgets to do the research to support the health claims and then shout them from the rooftops.” So we sometimes forget that “the hands-down healthiest foods in the supermarket are the unprocessed vegetables and fruits and whole grains. These foods sit silently in the produce section or the bulk-food bins. They don’t utter a word about their antioxidants or heart-healthiness, while just a few aisles over the sugary cereals scream about their heart-healthy ‘whole grain goodness.'”

So button mushrooms are healthy. What about taste? Now see, here’s the great thing about mushrooms—they are flavor sponges. In fact, you have to store them carefully so they don’t soak up flavors from your fridge [see Kitchen Notes for storage tips]. So while the more esoteric mushrooms offer delicious variations on the unmistakable earthy theme that make them absolutely worth exploring, button mushrooms, when combined with the right ingredients, can do some pretty amazing things too.

In the quick, simple recipes below, butter and salt combine first with garlic and parsley, then with port, to make the humble button heavenly. Continue reading “Mushrooms: In praise of the basic button”

Warm and sunny: Moroccan Braised Beef

Moroccan Braised Beef, made with golden raisins and an international mix of spices, delivers the warm, sweet/savory flavors of Morocco. Recipe below.

Last week, I sang the praises of oven-braising cheap cuts of beef for flavorful, juicy tenderness. With winter maintaining its icy choke hold on the Midwest, I was inspired to explore this technique further. Nothing like firing up the oven for a couple of hours and enjoying a hearty, meateriffic dinner to take the edge off the cold. Eventually, my virtual explorations led me to Morocco.

“Morocco.” The name alone conjures up exotic visions—Marrakesh, Casablanca [and Bogart and Bergman], souks [Moroccan markets] filled with dates, nuts, fragrant spices… Traditional Moroccan cuisine is as influenced by Europe and the spice trade routes as by being part of the African continent. Indeed, it is a mere eight miles [13 kilometers] from Spain at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Lamb, chicken and beef all figure heavily in Moroccan cooking, especially in their stewlike tagines [the name for the dishes themselves as well as the special ceramic pots in which they’re cooked].

As do spices. Cumin, ginger, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, turmeric, cayenne, saffron… Various takes on the Moroccan spice blend Ras-El-Hanout use some or all of these and other spices. The emphasis is on bold flavor, not heat. The recipe that became the basis for my braised beef even called for [authentically or otherwise] the Indian spice blend garam masala. Again, given the centuries of the spice trade through the region, it didn’t seem off the mark. And when the spice mix hit the hot pot early in the cooking process, it gave us an instant preview of the exotically delicious meal to come.

Mixing sweet with savory is also a big part of this cuisine. Besides onions, the vegetable that appeared most frequently in the recipes I found was carrots. And raisins showed up in more recipes than not. Once I’d settled on the beef dish, I started looking for a Moroccan side to accompany it. After the fourth or fifth recipe with raisins and pretty much the same spice mix, I served a simple salad on the side. And I opted for spooning the beef over a bed of ditali, instead of the recommended couscous. I felt the scale and texture of the tiny tubes worked better with the chunks of beef.

The beef itself was tender and full of flavor; the raisins [which plumped up to resemble small, golden grapes] and spice blend lent a definite sweet note to the savory meat. The cayenne delivered a bit of heat that sneaks up on you without overpowering the dish. Together, they served up a bit of warmth and sunshine on a cold Chicago night. Continue reading “Warm and sunny: Moroccan Braised Beef”

Slow good: Oven-braised beef stew

Slow, moist cooking in the oven makes inexpensive chuck roast juicy, flavorful and fork tender for this Oven-braised Beef Stew. Recipe below.

A couple of quick notes before I get started:

First, is green the new color of Valentine’s Day? Carmen and Aimee of the website Ecoscene report that Chicago high-end chocolatier Vosges Haut-Chocolat not only makes exotic treats guaranteed to spice up your Valentine’s Day—they do it green. In fact, they’re soon to be LEEDs certified.

Next, a quick little toot of the Blue Kitchen horn. Sometime last Sunday evening, the odometer clicked over to 100,000 hits. Very cool to see. But enough about me—let’s talk about stew.

I work in advertising. In just about every agency where I’ve worked, you’ll either see the following sign [usually in the print production manager’s office, if the agency’s big enough to have one], or creatives will bring it up when they think the suits aren’t standing up to the clients enough, particularly regarding deadlines:

GOOD
FAST
CHEAP

Pick two.

I know this sign isn’t unique to advertising—I’ve seen it in at least one car repair place, for instance. But wherever you see it, the message is clear. If you want something done good and fast, it’s going to cost you [almost anything can be done fast, if you throw enough money at it]. If you want something fast and cheap, it ain’t gonna be pretty. And if you want something good and cheap, it’s going to take some time.

Which brings me to beef stew meat. Stews were made for the cheap cuts. Chuck roast, the cut most commonly used for stew meat, has lots of connective tissue in it, which requires a long cooking time to break down so the meat will be tender. Conversely [and somewhat perversely], more expensive cuts of beef—steaks, for instance—get tougher the longer you cook them. This is why you should never order steak more than medium rare in a restaurant; and according to Anthony Bourdain, if you order a steak well done, you are guaranteed to get the worst steak the chef has at hand, because the steak is going to be ruined and it’s assumed you wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Here’s what the Restaurants & Institution’s Beef U site says about connective tissue:

“Connective tissues are the tendons and ligaments that attach muscles to the bone, and help give muscles their shape and form. The amount of connective tissue determines the meat’s tenderness; the greater the connective tissue, the less tender the meat. Muscles that are used for locomotion and power (i.e., in the legs and shoulders) have more connective tissue and typically yield less tender meat. The muscles of support (i.e., in the back—rib and loin) move less, are not as important for locomotion or power and, as a result, are more tender.”

Chuck comes from the shoulder, one of those locomotion and power sets of muscles. No problem—you just cook it a long time. Well, except the problem with that is the meat can tend to dry out when cooked a long time—especially, it turns out, on the stovetop. It’s nearly impossible to keep the temperature low enough with the pot sitting right there on the flame.

Blake over at The Paupered Chef wrote about cooking short ribs, another notoriously tough cut—wrote about it twice, in fact, once admitting his failure and once telling how he got it right. I remembered reading the second post and storing away in my brain that the difference was cooking them in the oven instead of on the stovetop.

Now, I’ve cooked stew for years. Good stew, not great stew. Oh, it’s always been hearty and satisfying, and I’ve generally gotten a nice mix of flavors going with wine and herbs. But often, the meat has tended toward the tough, dry, stringy side. Even if I cooked it over low heat for a couple of hours, same deal. So when stew weather hit with a vengeance—a spate of snowstorms, frigid temperatures and howling winds—I decided to solve this problem once and for all.

When meat’s the problem, start with meat solutions. I already knew what vegetables I wanted in my stew and how to prepare them, so instead of looking for stew recipes, I focused on the meat—specifically ways to braise beef, a slow, moist method of cooking. Remembering Blake’s tale of two short ribs, I rejected any stovetop recipes I found. Once I settled on a basic oven-braising recipe, I did what I always do—borrowed from other recipes I’d stumbled upon in the process as well as my own cooking experiences to morph it into my own take. And that take was delicious, if I say so myself—the beef flavorful, juicy and fork tender. Continue reading “Slow good: Oven-braised beef stew”